No, it’s wasn’t just you. Slack indeed went down due to an outage of some sort that appeared to have begun some time around 7:30PM ET. User-reported issues spiked on DownDetector.com, and the app was largely inaccessible, with posts not getting marked as read or not going through at all. The issues affected both the mobile and desktop versions of the app. Slack says it’s in the process of resolving the issue, but connectivity problems remain for some users.
Slack confirmed the outage on its status website, writing, “Users have reported general performance issues such message sending failures and timeouts. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and will provide an update shortly,” at 7:53PM ET. Shortly after at 8:02PM ET, the page was updated with, “Users are unable to connect to Slack. We are investigating and will provide an update shortly.”
The issues seemed widespread, although it may be too early to tell whether it’s isolated to any one part of the US. DownDetector reports indicated the outage was hitting the West Coast rather hard, but that may be a factor of Slack’s higher usage among tech companies.
On Twitter, Slack’s official account responded to journalist Jeff Elder saying it does not “have a super solid timeline at the moment” to how long it’s been down, and engineers are looking into what the issue is.
We don’t have a super solid timeline at the moment. We’re taking a look and hope to be back up shortly!
— Slack (@SlackHQ) May 13, 2020
At 8:43PM ET, Slack updated its status page with, “Some customers may be seeing improvements, but we’re still investigating the connectivity issues. We’ll be back in 30 minutes with another update. Thank you for bearing with us.” Shortly after, Slack said customers may be experiencing performance improvement,s but it’s still working to fully restore service.
We are seeing performance improvements and you may be able to connect once again. We’re working to fully restore service for everyone. Thank you for bearing with us.
— Slack (@SlackHQ) May 13, 2020
Update May 12th, 9:07PM ET: Added updates from Slack’s status website.
