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Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

status.slack.com

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Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#81
post #74

Can someone explain to me why any company should outsource something as critical as internal communication to a company that is 5 years old? The video messaging left aside, is it really that better than time-tested solutions like email or just running an IRC server?

It has emojis and is the Next Best Thing (tm)

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me quote from the previous HN discussion ”"”sauldcosta 4 days ago [-] We use downdetector.com because status pages tend to take up to an hour or so to update, if they ever do. reply jgrahamc 4 days ago [-] 1042 UTC First alert of global traffic problem 1057 UTC Internal group chat room up and running 1102 UTC Status page updated So, first alert to status page was 20 minutes.””” In those 20m we had repeatedly chec…

Yep. I tend to agree that we could have gone faster. The difficulty is that getting clear information out fast when you are dealing with a difficult situation is hard. But, I guess we could have put some status up quicker.

Thanks for the acknowledgement. Appreciate it's hard, false positives etc. Glad you see our PoV.

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#83

In other news: an unexplained productivity spike has been recorded today across the tech industry.

Or not. I'm remote and I cannot ask questions nor coordinate action to solve live production problems due to this outage. Slack is becoming a SPOF for many organizations, especially distributed.

It makes sense to have a fallback method set ahead of time, as others have mentioned.

You won't have access to the things slack integrates with but at least you can talk.

I know some people use IRC as a low-dependency fallback channel.

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#84
post #74

Can someone explain to me why any company should outsource something as critical as internal communication to a company that is 5 years old? The video messaging left aside, is it really that better than time-tested solutions like email or just running an IRC server?

Because they don’t trust their IT or operations groups to manage IRC or any other open source communication system; even as they trust those same people to run the software that makes them money.

/shrug

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#85
post #41
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The commenter above said they had to "solve live production problems", how exactly would "pre-defined tasks" help them?

I slipped over the "live" word, but I still stand by what I said. I most probably work in a similar environment, with tonnes of live production issues, and I believe it's a result of not being allowed to proactively plan for situations - most of the issues are a result of cost savings, systems driven to their absolute maximum capacity, etc. Live production issues are a byproduct of moving too fast, breaking too many…

What an incredibly arrogant generalization to make. You know there are also production issues created by moving too slow and failing to address pending scalability issues, right?

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#87
post #31

There are reasons why email is async and supposed to be decentralized, with priority based fallback options. (The priority in mx records). Most email servers try to deliver to fallbacks, and even if that fails, will try to deliver for _days_. For all people who think slack can replace email, think about these safeguards.

Isn't it better in nearly every situation to know something has failed immediately, rather than get a delivery failure notice a couple of days later?

[deleted]

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#88
post #74

Can someone explain to me why any company should outsource something as critical as internal communication to a company that is 5 years old? The video messaging left aside, is it really that better than time-tested solutions like email or just running an IRC server?

It's a reasonably nice client, and available on every platform.

It has easy integrations with basically everything, and non-developers can set them up on their own.

It has bouncer functionality built in - You don't miss messages. It can also archive them, and handle them in a corporate-compliant way without needing to speed a bunch of time setting that up manually.

Because it's a central company and not IRC push-notifications are easy.

Emoji are shared corporate wide, anyone can add them.

It's a really nice out of the box experience.

You can absolutely replicate it with enough setup and tweaking, but the free version of Slack will go a long way.

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#89
post #31

There are reasons why email is async and supposed to be decentralized, with priority based fallback options. (The priority in mx records). Most email servers try to deliver to fallbacks, and even if that fails, will try to deliver for _days_. For all people who think slack can replace email, think about these safeguards.

Isn't it better in nearly every situation to know something has failed immediately, rather than get a delivery failure notice a couple of days later?

In general mail servers will reply back with a failure notice within an hour or so. This isn't a standardized behavior and timeouts and retry semantics differ.

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#90
post #74

Can someone explain to me why any company should outsource something as critical as internal communication to a company that is 5 years old? The video messaging left aside, is it really that better than time-tested solutions like email or just running an IRC server?

Because they don’t trust their IT or operations groups to manage IRC or any other open source communication system; even as they trust those same people to run the software that makes them money. /shrug

IRC is just a protocol, neither the server nor the client do have to be open source.
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