
Slack is Down - kordless
http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/23/slack-is-having-a-panic-attack/
======
flippyhead
I might be alone on this but I find it strange that "XYZ Website is DOWN!!!"
is considered news worthy. I mean, if it's down and I care I know it
because... it's down. If I don't use it, why do I care again?

But then again, I never read tech crunch anymore because of different but
identical crap.

~~~
Zikes
I have to agree. When it's something big and business-critical, like AWS or
Azure or some other major host, that's newsworthy, but honestly we should
expect something like Slack to go down occasionally. So we can't chat for a
few hours on a Monday, email and other business-critical lines of
communication are still working just fine.

On the other hand, I don't particularly mind it, either. It's not hurting
anything, and maybe we need an excuse to dig up the old "proprietary
communication vs IRC" argument now and then, just for kicks.

~~~
simonw
Slack has become business critical at many companies - quite possibly
including TechCrunch (lots of media companies with distributed journalists use
Slack to co-ordinate everything).

------
viach
We'll know all the competitor names in this thread soon

~~~
oldmanjay
I don't understand why people can't just open up the window and yell to each
other, like my impression of New York City in the early 1900s, but hipper and
slicker.

Call it windowcasting maybe.

~~~
Gibbon1
A lighthearted joke to hold off the panic while slack gets their servers back
up.

Ever hear a New York Echo? No! Heeeeeellloooooooooooooooooo!!!!! ... ...
STFU!!

------
iamsohungry
Meanwhile, IRC continues to work exactly as well as it has for 20+ years.

~~~
nso95
IRC servers go down, too

~~~
thescriptkiddie
IRC is decentralized, so a few severs going down is no problem.

~~~
nso95
I suspect most internal IRC nets just consist of a single server

~~~
thescriptkiddie
That's not exactly a point for slack, since internal slack nets don't exist. I
call this "downtime as a service": you get all of the satisfaction an
interrupted work day without any of the annoyance of being able to fix it
yourself.

~~~
msbarnett
The flip side of that is with Slack, you have all the same problems as when
your internal IRC server going down, but without the additional productivity
loss of internal resources having to drop what they're doing to fix the damn
thing.

~~~
iamsohungry

        sudo service ircd-irc2 restart
    

I'm pretty sure SSH-ing into the server and executing that command costs less
in productivity than waiting for Slack to fix their issues.

------
colinbartlett
Thankfully their status page[1] is back up, though it was flaking for a bit
earlier. Transparency is the most important thing to me.

The status page is what I use to update StatusGator[2] so it can notify you
when services go down. It can even notify you by Slack (when it's up) and for
that reason I recommend using a second mode as well such as email, SMS, or
webhook if you want to get crafty.

1\. [https://status.slack.com](https://status.slack.com)

2\. [https://statusgator.io](https://statusgator.io)

------
rekoros
We ([https://sameroom.io](https://sameroom.io)) suggest rigging up a
contingency chat solution for situations like these.

Our service can be used to keep key channels synchronized between main and
secondary chat systems—to avoid losing context when switching over. Having
this in place is particularly important if _your_ outage coincides with team
chat outage.

Here's a post we wrote on this topic: [https://sameroom.io/blog/when-team-
chat-goes-down-are-you-re...](https://sameroom.io/blog/when-team-chat-goes-
down-are-you-ready/)

------
feld
I can't remember the last widespread outage for a major IRC network.

Just sayin'.

~~~
yeukhon
On freenode or alike, netsplit is too common, although few would consider that
as an outage of any sort.

------
kordless
Starting about 30 minutes ago, my Slack clients all started having issues
connecting to Slack. It went from working to not working in about 10 seconds.
I've also been trying to access the Slack Status page with little success.
Their Twitter account doesn't seem to be very helpful, but is at least
working: [https://twitter.com/SlackHQ](https://twitter.com/SlackHQ)

------
drinchev
Previous discussion

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10616743](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10616743)

------
skdd8
Reactiflux - the React.js chat/discussion room moved away from Slack to
Discord ([https://discordapp.com/](https://discordapp.com/)) a couple of
months back. the reason was: "Slack decided that Reactiflux had too many
members and disabled new invites"

here is a post with more info:
[https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/10/19/reactiflux-...](https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/10/19/reactiflux-
is-moving-to-discord.html)

~~~
nixgeek
How is this related to the outage?

~~~
skdd8
It is related in the way that there are other tools out there that users can
use, if people are frustrated by these outages.

~~~
nixgeek
All I can say is I sympathise and empathise with their operations team.

Outages happen to everyone, including I'm sure Discord, and what matters most
to me is transparency during and after the incident and that both individual
and corporate values include incremental improvement - not making the same
mistake twice.

I'm perpetually frustrated by HN comments which take a tack of either pointing
out (with your benefit of hindsight) things the commenter feels were
incorrect, professing they could do better, or the strong advocacy for
abandoning ship even with companies who have a provably pretty decent uptime
record.

~~~
skdd8
I am also frustrated with demoting comments that offer other alternatives or
paint a different side of the picture.

Unfortunately I cannot sympathize with a company which it's valuation is $2.8
billon, and cannot handle staying up or a large userbase.

~~~
dasil003
I didn't downvote you, but I suspect the reason you were is because it smells
like opportunistic astroturf.

------
click170
Meanwhile, Hipchat has been having issues on and off for weeks and nobody says
a thing.

------
davelnewton
Thus begins the slew of "Slack oh noes" posts.

~~~
wuliwong
Actually there have been more posts like yours, predicting those types of
posts than those types of posts themselves.

~~~
davelnewton
Interesting, because I saw only mine, but 6-12 Slack posts.

