• by Ray Schultz , January 4, 2021

Slack, the presumptive replacement for email that is now being acquired by Salesforce for $27.7 billion, crashed worldwide on Monday morning. 

“Customers may have trouble loading channels or connecting to Slack at this time,” the company wrote at 10:14 a.m. EAT. “Our team is investigating and we'll follow up with more information as soon as we have it. We apologize for any disruption caused.” 

At 1 p.m., Slack reported: “Some customers may be able to connect, but may also experience degraded performance. We're continuing to work to resolve the issue.”

Downdetector reported thousands of complaints, starting after 10 a.m. Of those, 73% were for connecting, 25% for sending messages an 1% for website difficulties. 

At 12:29 p.m., Slack added, “While the issue is largely still ongoing, we believe some customers may see improvement in connecting to Slack after a refresh (CTRL/CMD + R). Earlier, the company said: “We're still all hands on deck and continuing to dig in on our side.” 

In the United States, the worst spots appeared to be New York and San Francisco on the downdetector map. But reports came in to downdetector from as far afield as the Ukraine and Argentina.  

“Nothing like a slack outage to remind you just how socially isolating working from home is…”, wrote one Slack user on downdetector.  

"7:45am email team members, sign in to Teams.. nobody responds to anything.. 8am, meeting I got up way to earlier for.. over slack. No response to emails or teams D: Watch as all of slack's status goes red."

Media reports noted that the outage is occurring on the first work day of the new year.

Slack has vowed that it will replace email as a workplace collaboration tool.

UPDATE: At 2:28 p.m. EST, Slack posted, "We're seeing improvements with error rates on our side, and we believe affected customers should be able to access Slack."

It added, "We're continuing to work to resolve the trouble with calendar apps and email notifications."