Slack Starts 2021 With Outage

Workplace communication and collaboration specialist Slack Technologies admitted its service suffered a global outage on Monday, which disrupted people returning to work from the Christmas and New Year break.

“Customers may be experiencing issues connecting and using Slack at this time,” Slack said in a tweet. “Our team is currently investigating and we’re sorry for any troubles this may be causing. Please see https://status.slack.com for updates.”

According to Downdetector, the Slack service began experiencing problems around 10am EST, with problems recorded in countries such as the US, UK, Germany, India, Japan and elsewhere.

Slack outage

But five hours later at 1pm EST, users on Twitter began confirming that the service was restored, although Slack’s website said customers may still be experiencing disruptions.

“Some customers may be able to connect, but may also experience degraded performance,” Slack said in a tweet. “We’re continuing to work to resolve the issue.”

Slack is currently in the process of being acquired by CRM powerhouse Salesforce, which announced in early December last year that it was buying the firm in a deal worth $27.7 billion.

Slack was founded way back in 2009, and its rapid growth over the years did not go unnoticed in Silicon Valley.

Indeed, the firm was reportedly a $9 billion acquisition target for Amazon back in 2017.

As the Coronavirus pandemic engulfed the world in February 2020, companies began actively to switch staff to working from home.

This further drove demand for services such as Slack, and also similar services from Google, Microsoft, Facebook.

Microsoft Teams is perhaps being one of the most notable competitor to Slack, alongside Facebook at Work, Yammer and others.