
Slack was down - geerlingguy
https://status.slack.com/2019-07/b31a6510b8caabcc
======
mradonic
This is becoming so often it's embarrassing really.

The way it's handled in the app is also not ideal to say the least - only
indication that something is wrong is that the text you are trying to send is
greyed out.

~~~
newaccoutnas
Eventually the status bar appears saying they're having an issue.

~~~
mradonic
Hmmmm, I have 3 workspaces, 1 is paid for, and I got this message only in the
paid one :D

Is it stated in the pricing page that you get better error handling if you
pay?

~~~
jeltz
I didn't get it for either the paid one or the free one so it might be a
coincidence.

------
ravedave5
Since twitter went down the other week hackernews is now the primary 'is it
down?' news site.

~~~
wglb
I don't think this is the appropriate forum for "is down" postings.

Post-mortems are interesting.

~~~
hombre_fatal
They're upvoted because people can't resist making the same tired "see? we are
over-reliant on {Slack,Github,Cloudflare,etc}!" comments.

~~~
sorenn111
My favorite are the conspiracy theories as to why the outages are seemingly so
close together in this Summer of 2019. All kinds of imaginative reasons
abound.

My best guess is summer vacation :) it's at least true for my company who was
one of the featured outages

~~~
moate
My best guess is that "sequencing creates narratives." It's like in baseball,
how a player who hits .333 over the season will have 0-10 and 10-10 stretches
where he either can't hit everything or demolishes every pitch he sees. You'll
often see sports news come up with stories for why this is happening, and most
of the time it's just "this is how statistics work".

TL;dr- complex systems are complex, and trying to understand them isn't
usually possible for outside parties.

~~~
Dumblydorr
Not entirely true regarding sports, 538 has done some decent analyses of
basketball shooting and found that hot and cold shooting is often true, the
same is likely true for baseball. Streaks are naturally occurring, both for
randomness and due to other, harder to explain factors.

------
anaphor
If you're a community driven project or organization using Slack, then take a
look at [https://zulipchat.com/](https://zulipchat.com/) for something that
sucks less, and is open source software. I've found it much more pleasant to
use and less buggy than Slack.

~~~
nixgeek
Wish we wouldn’t use such language, “sucks less” is highly subjective and your
opinion but we don’t need to disparage Slack in order to make a point that
alternatives like Zulip are available.

Seems like especially poor tone on an outage thread... “Don’t kick them while
they’re down” or something?

~~~
allana
2GB of RAM use for 6 open tabs in Slack is pretty awful, their desktop client
has set the bar to compete with Slack on performance very low.

This abusive resource usage has created a dislike of Slack among a subset of
its users.

~~~
timdorr
They actually just fixed that in 4.0: [https://slackhq.com/introducing-a-more-
efficient-slack-deskt...](https://slackhq.com/introducing-a-more-efficient-
slack-desktop-experience)

I'm currently sitting at 400MB total usage (including helpers) for 4
workspaces.

~~~
MisterTea
400MB? Not bad for a chat client that sends a few bytes of text.

~~~
user5994461
Aren't your coworkers sharing 10 MB gifs all day long?

~~~
qrbLPHiKpiux
The reason I don't like twitter because of all the dumb reaction gifs.

~~~
dymk
Still can't blame the browser when it consumes a gigabyte of ram, when we ask
it to show us a gigabyte of gifs

------
chasedehan
I really don't like the heavy dependence on Slack that my (and a lot of other)
company has. The outage is frustrating.

~~~
freehunter
See, I love it. I work for a mostly-remote company and before Slack we had an
IM product but it was a 1:1 chat. Having an always-on chat room for the entire
team, knowing other teams use the same product and I can pop into their chat
room, spinning up channels for project teams, etc. It's been a huge boost to
our company.

And since so many companies have settled on the same solution, when I'm
working with a client I can join their Slack workspace too. That cuts down on
the numerous quick phone calls and long email threads that we used to have.

Slack vs Teams vs IRC vs anything else, I don't care. It's not about the
product. But my company (and most of our clients) didn't have this capability
before Slack even though IRC existed for decades, so I'm going to give Slack
some credit.

~~~
mr__y
It seems that you could take any old-school internet tech, add some flashy
GUI, slap "for enterprise" label and you get a great and popular solution that
solves the problem noone ever could solve. Maybe it's time for gopher for
enterprise

~~~
freehunter
That's really what it comes down to. Email existed forever, but no one really
_liked_ it until Gmail made it flashy. Smartphones existed forever but no one
really _liked_ them until Apple/Google made them flashy. Search existed
forever but no one really _liked_ it until Google made it flashy.

Hackers like to pretend that presentation doesn't matter, but in the end
presentation is the _only thing_ that matters.

~~~
rocky1138
Sorry, you are wrong. This is pure revisionism.

Blackberry was absolutely massive before the iPhone, email has always been the
largest use of the internet (until media became possible), and Google search
became successful because it actually worked, unlike everything available at
the time.

I do agree with your sentiment, though. To the user, the UI is the product.

~~~
freehunter
I owned several Windows Mobile phones, one Blackberry, and one Palm device
before iPhone and Android came out. I know the history. They were _not_
popular devices. Even just looking at Blackberry sales by themselves, sales of
these devices pre-iPhone were absolutely insignificant [1].

Same thing with email. Hotmail/Yahoo/AOL pre-dated Gmail by quite a long time,
but Gmail now owns something like 80% of all webmail traffic.

I think your confusion might be where I said "these things existed but no one
really liked them" maybe you read "these things didn't exist before"?

[1] [https://www.statista.com/statistics/266240/global-revenue-
of...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/266240/global-revenue-of-rim-
since-2004/)

------
namelosw
I remember there's a Slack architecture case study by AWS[0]. I was a little
bit surprised that the architecture can hold such huge traffic.

As a comparison, Discord use's tech stack is more niche and cutting edge[1],
but they seem to know very well what they are doing.

It's interesting because AWS use Slack's architecture as a case study because
it's a little bit mediocre, that their major potential customers can
understand and use. I just don't think AWS will ever use Discord's
architecture as a case study...

[0] [https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-
studies/slack/](https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/slack/) [1]
[https://blog.discordapp.com/scaling-
elixir-f9b8e1e7c29b](https://blog.discordapp.com/scaling-elixir-f9b8e1e7c29b)

~~~
pavanagrawal123
discord is also primary on GCP, afaik?

------
elwell
" _Some workspaces_ might be experiencing issues with messages sending and
loading."

(emphasis mine) Is that marketing-speak to lessen the loss of trust?

~~~
exothermic
I think it was actually true- I am signed in to two workspaces -- one paid
plan and one free -- and only the latter has been unavailable so far.

~~~
aarbor989
For me it was actually the opposite. I was thinking that only paid workspaces
were impacted, which would be mildly funny

------
mr__y
There are a lot of such issues recently on many major websites/services. Is it
just me or are those more frequent than a few years ago?

~~~
Kovah
Absolutely feels like that, if it's true would be a task for DownDetector or
similar sites with their datasets.

However, this may be the result of increased dependence on centralized
services which gain more and more traffic, which is more difficult to handle
and even simple Regex rules (see Cloudflare outage recently) can break
everything. To be honest, I don't want to ever be in charge of keeping such
complex systems online.

------
danielecook
Seems like an open-source self-managed solution would be preferable at this
point.

~~~
mffnbs
In my experience, in-house hosted products have had much more frequent outages
than the SAAS alternatives. Then when there is an outage, it's down for hours
instead of minutes.

------
black_puppydog
_RAM prices go tumbling_

~~~
_asummers
The new update was actually _very_ good for my RAM usage. Still a lot for a
chat app but significantly less than before.

~~~
black_puppydog
_RAM prices crash_

------
zzyzxd
January is the only month that slack didn't have a downtime this year. They
must have some serious infrastructure issue.

~~~
olefoo
Usage climbing as they become a mainstream choice... what we call a "nice
problem to have".

Of course they do have some funded fast followers now; eager to take on any
defecting users.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
I heard about this news on IRC. Can barely remember the last Freenode outage -
must have been years ago.

------
papln
Why hasn't Slack built a P2P fallback for Enterprise teams?

Slack server knows at least which clients has recently been active in a
chatroom, so the server could send that information to clients (per privacy
opt-in) who can then make a best-effort attempt to send their new messages to
the recently-active clients.

Perhaps that's just self-hosting with extra steps. At some point, isn't it
cost-effective to offer customers a SaaSBox that they can deploy as a minimal-
functionality on-prem backup to the cloud service?

------
duxup
One of those frustrating situations where i think my message is sent, but it
isn't, and sometimes I'm getting responses and sometimes not.

Half failing is way worse than completely failing.

------
aantix
Slightly offtopic : As a remote engineer, I wonder if half-duplex voice (kind
of like a CB radio) would be superior for communication vs typing everything?

E.g. when I have an idea, I just talk, that comment is recorded and made
available to the chat room.

I'd like to get back some of the nuance of language that just isn't possible
with text.

There'd have to be some easy way of playing back the voice snippets in order
that were posted to the chat room.

Maybe Discord is superior to Slack for this.. I've never used it.

~~~
dudul
I think it's a terrible idea. Writing things down, is the first step towards
really thinking it through, making sure it makes sense, etc.

~~~
aantix
True, when in isolation.

I'm thinking more of collaboration - when the solution isn't necessarily known
and there's a lot of back and forth.

------
JasonFruit
I propose the hashtag #SlackOff.

------
bkq
I honestly don't know how Slack can tout themselves as the email killer [1],
when they seem to have rather consistent downtime.

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/style/slack-replace-
email...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/style/slack-replace-email-ipo-
listing.html)

~~~
sleepybrett
I've worked in organizations where exchange is down more than it's up. _shrug_

------
120bits
I see lot of frustration and alternatives provided for slack. However, I'm
genuinely curious about the degree of dependence on slack for team based
communication? Do people not use email anymore? We have slack at my company as
well and yes it was frustrating, but we have email list. Thing just works.

P.S I don't work for slack or have any affiliation.

------
totaldude87
Now we can put slack into the list of Major league tech companies which cannot
keep the services up and running 24/7.

Cloudflare Facebook and its group of companies Azure cloud Google Cloud ,
twitter etc etc

AWS, eyes are you now :)

~~~
rocky1138
S3 went down for nearly an entire workday a few years ago. It legit pretty
much broke everything. We all went home because there was no way to do any
work.

~~~
balls187
Funny enough, that S3 outtage busted Slack's file feature.

------
notnull
Is it really that hard to spin up an IRC server for moments like these? I too
have had to switch to Skype communications today. I wish people used IRC in
the first place so I could write my own bots.

~~~
komali2
I've been meaning to figure out how to do this for my office. From what I can
understand, setting up the IRC server is easy, making it "secure" is kinda
hard, getting slack features like shared history (so you can log out, back in,
and see your messages) is fairly hard. I've only done cursory glancing over
blogs though.

Also I would need to help my coworkers choose and settle on a client.
Particularly one for the phone. I used to use androidIRC but I kept getting
booted from channels cause when it was in my pocket it would spam
connect/disconnects.

------
ianceicys
Yep down here too.
[https://status.slack.com/2019-07/b31a6510b8caabcc](https://status.slack.com/2019-07/b31a6510b8caabcc)

------
phy6
Downdetector reporting a lot of AWS complaints simultaneously.

~~~
totaldude87
NA is all green per --
[https://status.aws.amazon.com/](https://status.aws.amazon.com/)

------
mslate
Any alternatives to Slack with parity screensharing functionality?

Being able to draw on the screen is so valuable for remote pair
programming—Hangouts/Skype don’t cut it

~~~
rerx
We use Zoom for that.

But we still rely on Slack for general messaging and chat rooms.

------
diegoperini
My Android tests on my test device started failing at the same time. Is Slack
app's background service flooding my network?

~~~
jbkkd
My charger blew the electricity off at the same time. Got back online without
slack working, I thought I broke the internet

~~~
diegoperini
That's a cool post-mortem story, thanks for contributing!

------
DrWumbo
With Slack unable to send messages, I had to contact people via _trembles_
Skype for Business

~~~
throwaway123x2
I would love it if I could use Skype, but Skype has been consistently crashing
on my machine for the last month. And even when it opens, it almost never
works correctly.

------
PedroBatista
Well, since ( according to ) Slack is the be all and end all of business
communication and killed email, I can only imagine the absolute caos
throughout the World that's going on right now.

I expect an economic downturn worst than the Depression in the 30's.

------
jparsons42
Since we have GSuite at work, figured I'd post my first thread to
chat.google.com and imagine that's our plan for #SlackDown. Don't imagine
anyone will notice and that life will carry-on. Even created #general ;-)

~~~
aquaticsunset
It's a really viable fallback - I did the same thing this morning. The only
difference is the team / channel aspect. While Google Chat supports those
features, the effort to seamlessly fallover to "backup channels" is harder
than DM-type stuff.

------
kyberias
Quick! Analyze whether there was any correlation between number of bugs
created (in Github repos, for example) and the Slack downtime.

------
papito
Ponder for a second how many bits of sensitive information and competition
secrets are right now on Slack.

------
elwell
The recent rise in Slack downtime might be enough to actually cause
significant churn.

------
artur_makly
what also sucks is that they don't offer an 'offline' mode to read existing
msgs! (update - this works on IOS but not on the desktop..for me at least)

------
Rakshith
I had to reload so many times. I emailed instead

------
black_13
And there was much rejoicing.

------
max0563
It was funny at first now all this downtime stuff is just ridiculous

~~~
dbbk
Is downtime ever really funny?

------
peterkelly
... and productivity is up

------
CzarnyZiutek
"destroy the skynet" john connor

