It’s not just you. Slack reports disruptions

For about 10-million people, work got off to a rocky start on the US East coast morning of March 9th when they were unable to use Slack. The problem wasn’t on the internet or their computers; Slack itself was suffering from a series of problems.

The trouble began at 5:49 AM Eastern Standard Time when Slack reported that “We’re receiving reports around trouble with uploading files and other features. We are truly sorry for this inconvenience, and we will keep you posted with further details.”

Any hopes that this would be a mere glitch vanished as hours went by and the problems continued to mount. New issues popped up. These included–deep breath–“calls, huddles, email processing, file uploads, emoji reactions retention, new DM groups retention in the sidebar, Search, Workflow Builder, Workflow pop-out windows, Channel creation, API errors, webhooks, and Slack Connect invites.”

In short, everything and the kitchen sink was going wrong.

By 10:57 AM Eastern, Slack finally had “identified the issue causing disruption.” But that’s not the same thing as a fix. “Our team is continuing to work on a solution.” Slack asks for your patience as they continue to work on a fix.

As of noon Eastern, Slack disruptions are still happening. The service does not appear to have ever gone down completely despite all this. 

Finally, Slack found a fix at 12:18 PM. But you may still see trouble. Slack advises you to refresh your workspace. If you continue to have problems, please e-mail:  [email protected].

Slack has been suffering from outages all too often. This includes system failures on February 22nd and January 4th, 2021. 

Slack’s current woes have nothing to do with yesterday’s Google Cloud networking problems that led to Spotify and Discord going down for several hours. 

None of these problems, despite online rumors to the contrary, appear to have anything to do with Russian hackers. That said, everyone should still be on the alert for hacking attacks because of Russia’s attack on Ukraine. These are not safe times.

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