
Slack is offline - soroso
https://status.slack.com/?20171031
======
Arathorn
This is probably preaching to the choir, but hosting your own FOSS chat is
nowadays a very viable way to avoid being dependent on a centralised service
like Slack. Your options include:

* Riot.im / Matrix.org (decentralised global network; e2e encryption; open protocol)

* Rocket.Chat (Meteor-based; focus on UX and feature)

* MatterMost.com (clone of Slack UI; open core license)

* Zulip.org (all about threads!)

* ...or indeed IRC or XMPP.

(disclaimer; I work on Matrix).

~~~
acchow
Is there reason to believe self hosting will have better uptime?

~~~
scaryclam
Generally yes, given the reasons others have said. Other than that, at the
very least, outages can be dealt with more proactively when you have your own
setup. Third parties won't have the same priorities that your company does.

~~~
seanp2k2
Since Slack's main business is chat, they have a pretty good incentive to get
everything working again ASAP. Here's their SLA for "plus plan" and Enterprise
plan:

    
    
      Our Plus plan Service Level Agreement (SLA) guarantees a 99.99% monthly uptime1
      We’ve designed our SLA to be simple and transparent — based directly on the information we make publicly available on 
      Slack’s System Status page.
      If we fall short of our 99.99% uptime guarantee, we’ll refund customers on the Plus plan 100 times the amount your 
      workspace paid during the period Slack was down.
    

Source: [https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204113126-Plus-
plan...](https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204113126-Plus-plan-Service-
Level-Agreement-SLA-) \+ [https://get.slack.help/hc/en-
us/articles/115003205446-Plans-...](https://get.slack.help/hc/en-
us/articles/115003205446-Plans-products-features-#slack-for-enterprise)

Chat is a commodity these days. For most businesses, it probably makes more
sense to just let the companies in the business of offering paid chat services
do their thing.

------
nategri
Yo, people who like to complain that Slack just re-implements IRC... This Is
Your Moment

~~~
mpd
At least with IRC I could connect to another server.

~~~
LambdaComplex
Or host your own

------
pkrumins
I've switched to using TwistApp
([https://www.twistapp.com](https://www.twistapp.com)) with my team. Unlike
Slack where you have channels where everyone talks about everything, TwistApp
bases conversations around threads. Every problem that's being worked on has
its own thread. Once it's completed, I close and archive the threads. Very
effective for getting things done as every task is isolated in a separate
thread and discussions don't overlap.

Also read this post by Amir, the founder of TwistApp, "Why we're betting
against real time messaging" \- [https://blog.doist.com/why-were-betting-
against-real-time-te...](https://blog.doist.com/why-were-betting-against-real-
time-team-messaging-521804a3da09)

~~~
ivm
Twist also has a native Mac app.

------
cadr
When the _status_ page is returning a 500 error... not a good sign.

~~~
munk-a
It's an even worse sign when the page half-loads with some stylesheets
missing.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
Maybe they should not serve the static content with "Cache-Control: max-
age=1". That's rarely a good idea.

------
carlchenet
You could use this time to read The Slack threat [https://carlchenet.com/the-
slack-threat/](https://carlchenet.com/the-slack-threat/)

------
NightMKoder
I'm hoping they publish a public post-mortem. Learning from this kind of
outage is the best kind experience for engineering - though it's far better
when only staging goes down and not prod.

~~~
losingthefight
Looks like they won't:
[https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/925586114152411137](https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/925586114152411137)

We've no solid plans right now as we're focused on tidying things up
internally, but will consider it. Thanks again for holding tight

------
eridius
Hasn't Slack learned yet that you're supposed to host your status page on a
different infrastructure?

~~~
Johnny555
I think they did.

The slack.com IP's are owned by AWS, while status.slack.com resolves to some
Digital Ocean IP's.

~~~
eridius
Then why did the Slack Status page have so many problems at the same time?
Half the time loading it would give a 500 Internal Server Error, 45% of the
time you'd get broken resources (images and/or CSS), and only 5% of loads
would give you the full working page.

~~~
detaro
Maybe they underestimated how much resources their status page needs during an
actual outage.

------
BrentOzar
And of course today's the first day we're using Slack for audience Q&A at a
conference. 360 folks in a room now have to...raise their hands! So barbaric.

------
kamilszybalski
Slack is currently down and I've realized, for better or worse, what Slack has
really done.. It's created an expectation for immediacy. I thought about
sending my question to someone via email but then just thought, "I'll wait for
Slack to be back up, it'll be faster anyhow".

~~~
matchagaucho
_My first thought:_

"Slack is down? Better post to Slack and let the team know."

~~~
jonkiddy
You're not alone. I had the same thought.

------
alexasmyths
I worked for BlackBerry when outages started to become a thing.

When your business motto is 'always on' \- it's really, really bad to be 'off'
\- it's a deep transgression of the brand promise.

BB was structured poorly for this - they didn't grasp the concept of multiple
nodes of redundancy very well. (Easy in hindsight).

But - we should all be impressed at how highly available Google, FB and some
other brands are. That's impressive.

------
a12l
Team: if you're reading this, get out the radios.

------
oplav
Here's the incident page:
[https://status.slack.com/2017-10/8b0d4d44ea53726f](https://status.slack.com/2017-10/8b0d4d44ea53726f)

------
kiloreux
I just realized that being a remote team. I can't join any of my teammates.
Neither see live changes to the infrastructure and the repositories.

The things we take for granted.

~~~
urda
If slack being down means you lose all insight into your build process and
code management, you seriously need to introduce a secondary option
immediately.

~~~
typomatic
OP didn't say "all insight". There's a difference between being unable to see
a stream of change events and not being able to see the current state of the
system. The latter is completely unacceptable, whereas the former is just
annoying.

------
westoncb
Maybe Slack decided to give us all a break for Halloween :)

Also curious: why is this so low on the front page? 250 points, posted an hour
ago...

------
philfreo
Reminder why your status page should be hosted in a very different way than
your regular infrastructure... so you're way less likely to end up with issues
on both at the same time.

I like how statuspage.io even has metastatuspage.com in case their primary
domain/DNS/TLD has issues.

~~~
theboywho
Reminder that you should check things first before commenting. Slack's status
page is in a different infrastructure, somewhere using digital ocean while
slack.com is using AWS.

------
nikolay
Nice! I wondered why my productivity suddenly doubled up!

------
internalfx
My RocketChat server is running just fine ;P

~~~
5ilv3r
So is my jabber server!

------
peterlk
This page seems to not be throwing 500s:
[https://status.slack.com/2017-10/8b0d4d44ea53726f](https://status.slack.com/2017-10/8b0d4d44ea53726f)

------
SolaceQuantum
This is certainly scary for the Slack devs... Happy Halloween!

~~~
nouveau0
Spoopy day at Slack

------
chris_wot
Causing chaos at my workplace. We have Slack integrated into our incident
management solution... very, very unfortunate.

------
akulbe
Slack _DOWN_! Productivity _UP_!

#jokingpeopleCOMEON

------
quadrant6
Wow, talk about realising how much we rely on Slack.. suddenly I feel so
disconnected and alone.

[https://www.customd.com/articles/65/slack-is-
down](https://www.customd.com/articles/65/slack-is-down)

~~~
Willson50
That was the most annoying scrolling experience I've ever had.

------
legohead
don't push code at 4pm! and on Halloween, oof..

------
jnaulty

      We are aware of connectivity issues and are actively lnvestigating.
      3:58 PM PDT・See in your timezone
    

They spelled investigating with a lower-case 'l' :\ Does that bug anyone other
than me?

~~~
fiatpandas
When your hands are shaking from adrenaline because your pre-IPO company is
suffering from a global outage, you might hit an l instead of an i.

~~~
theossuary
No worse feeling than typing out a status update without any idea of what's
going on.

------
eridal
Why CPU goes like crazy every time slack loses connectivity?

You can easily test this by disconnecting from wifi. As soon as you're offline
the fan starts spinning until you get your connection back.

~~~
scott_karana
I'm pretty sure that "refresh" tries to bootstrap the whole world. Eg, it'll
reload all JS assets in addition to just restarting WebSockets

------
cheerioty
That's why there's StatusPage.io :)

~~~
tooltalk
I think you meant to say statuspage.io, not statuspage.com

------
jaredsohn
FYI, slack seems to be up again now (at least for me.)

------
msarchet
not anymore? - EDIT: the status page was fine and then it wasn't.

~~~
yellowapple
Seems like every other request is throwing a 500 error. Maybe one server in a
load-balanced cluster is erroring out?

------
4lch3m1st
I'm not really a Slack user, but isn't Keybase always an option?

~~~
JshWright
If by "always" you mean "as of a couple weeks ago, and with a small subset of
the features".

------
c0smic
Just a spooky coincidence it's on Halloween?

------
internalfx
Is this getting flagged off of HN?

~~~
gtdawg
Looks like it. When I first loaded HN 2 minutes after this outage started, the
story was #2. Then I refreshed after 3 minutes and it wasn't on the front page
at all. Used the search tool to find it and then upvoted.

~~~
internalfx
Looks like somebody wants to keep this quiet. 65 points in 12 minutes is good
enough to be #1.

~~~
grzm
High comment rates can also trigger the "overheated discussion detector",
which will downweight a submission.

~~~
chris_wot
Perhaps the HN mods should do something about that then.

~~~
grzm
If you see something like this and you think it's in error, you can let them
know and they'll likely be able to respond more quickly. There's a contact
link in the footer.

~~~
chris_wot
You're joking, right?

~~~
grzm
No, I'm not. In my experience the mods are quite responsive, and have
explained site behavior on more than a few occasions. They've also adjusted
flags and weights of submissions if they identify an issue.

------
orthoganol
How is there nothing on the front page of HN, slack being out for almost an
hour now?

Given timeframe and upvotes, how is this not the top of HN?

~~~
5ilv3r
It is now

------
coleca
How can I tell my team that Slack is down? :-)

~~~
5ilv3r
pagerdoodie?

------
artur_makly
the loss of revenue.. is unquantifiable.

------
Narzerus
O.o god help us

------
partycoder
Slack has a nice market share, but also many competitors, many of them 100%
ripoffs with the same features (to name a few, Attlassian HipChat and MS
Teams... not to mention open source products).

Slack has been experiencing service degradation often lately, so I would not
be surprised if people start switching.

In our team we already started looking for an alternative.

~~~
bojo
HipChat came out long before Slack.

~~~
dbenhur
Yeah and they've had service degradation and availability issues long before
Slack also. ;-P

