Credit: Dreamstime
Slack fell victim to an outage on Wednesday morning, leaving scores of coronavirus-rendered home workers unable to connect to the service.
The communication platform's users first encountered issues with sending messages and general performance as of 9:53am AEST, according to Slack’s status page. Nine minutes later, this was upgraded to an outage, with users being unable to connect to the platform outright.
“You may be unable to connect to Slack at the moment,” Slack’s official Twitter account posted. “We're very sorry for the disruption and we're doing our best to get you back online as fast as we can.”
The outage lasted for over two hours, although some users experienced improvements after approximately an hour, according to the status page. As of publishing, service to the platform has been fully restored and the company claims that users should be able to connect.
"We're very sorry for the disruption. We appreciate your patience as we worked to get everyone back online," the status page note
The outage was also felt by Stewart Butterfield, CEO and co-founder of Slack, who commented on Twitter that he is “in the same boat” as others. “Right now the best people are all over it and I'm confident we'll be back soon,” he said.
The disruption comes at a vital time for the service as businesses shift their workforces to operate from home amid the coronavirus pandemic, putting considerable strain on networks to keep communication services going.
Slack is looking to pivot itself to better assist its users during the pandemic, as it announced in March that it was integrating Microsoft Team’s calling features into its services.
As of 25 March, the service fielded 12.5 million concurrent users, with the creation rate of new Slack workplaces increasing by “hundreds of per cent” from 12 March to 25 March, the company said at the time.
Slack has been contacted for additional comment.
Article updated on 13 May at 12:50pm to include that the connection issue has been fixed.
