In what"s likely to be the first workday of 2021 for many, popular enterprise messaging tool Slack is down. Reports of the outage started coming in earlier today, and now the team has confirmed that the service is indeed experiencing an outage, leaving all aspects of the service non-functional. Initially, Slack"s status page only acknowledged an incident with messaging and connections, but it"s now been updated to reflect that outage.
It"s certainly not the best way to start off the year, and there"s not much you can do aside from using alternative communication tools. Slack has yet to clarify what the root cause of the issue is or provide a timeline on when functionality will be back to normal, but the company is working on restoring its services. The number of reports on Downdetector.com seems to be on the decline, however.
Outages like this are nothing new, and even Google capped off 2020 with an outage of its own, specifically related to its account system, leaving many tools, such as Gmail, inaccessible for a few hours. We"ll keep updating this post as the situation evolves.
Update: Slack has updated the service status, saying that some users may see an improvement by refreshing the app by pressing Ctrl+R (or Cmd+R on macOS). However, most will still probably have issues.
Update 2: Slack now says some users may be able to use the service again, but with downgraded performance. The team is still working to fix the issues.
Update 3: Slack has now confirmed that its services have been restored and refreshing the app should get things back to normal.
Thanks to our user barnacles for bringing this to our attention!