Slack Confirmed It Suffered a Widespread Outage Monday Morning but Resolved Most Problems as of 3pm Et, Except for Some Integrations and Email Notifications (Slack Etlyons Theverge)

Slack Etlyons Theverge: Monday morning, Slack’s status on their website read “Partial outage.” This was later updated to “Slack is currently experiencing a widespread outage and we’re working hard to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.”

As of 3pm ET, most of the problems have been resolved, but some still exist. Integrations with other services and email notifications are not functioning properly. Slack has yet to comment on these issues.

The outages were reported by many around the world, not just in the US. Slack’s services are used by almost 8 million people, and the company has been valued at $5 billion.

Slack is a communication tool similar to other popular apps, including Facebook, Google Hangouts, and Microsoft Skype. With Slack, employees can talk to each other or use various features like the searchable message history and the ability to easily share files. The platform and apps are available in the App Store and on Google Play.

Google Play currently lists 11 apps from Slack with at least 3,300 downloads. Those apps are used for the ability to create projects and share files, as well as for notifications. The apps work between two devices that are the same model or a version behind or above that of Google’s current Pixel or Nexus 5X.

Here is an excerpt from Slack’s website announcing the outage:

We’re currently experiencing a widespread service outage affecting many channels and apps. We’re deeply sorry for the inconvenience and are working diligently to bring things back to normal as quickly as possible. — Slack (@SlackHQ) January 23, 2017

Update 2:15pm ET: A representative from Slack has reached out to us and said, “We’re still experiencing a widespread outage affecting many channels and apps, but we’re making progress on resolving them all. Some were due to bugs in a recent patch; some were due to our proactive rollout that increased capacity; some are due to changes in Google APIs. We’re sorry for the inconvenience and are working diligently to resolve all issues.”

Update 7:00am ET, 11 January 2017: Slack has uploaded a new patch they call “Free Up Space” which is supposed to help with the traffic issues. You can read more about it on this page. The update is also available in the App Store for iOS and the Google Play Store for Android.

Update 9:45am ET, 12 January 2017:”The majority of impacted integrations, channels and apps are back up and running. Many of the issues that caused this outage were due to changes in the Slack SDK. These integrations, channels and apps should be available again soon. We’re continuing to investigate this and other events which resulted in increased load yesterday.”

The number of users affected by the outage was unknown, but it seems that it was more widespread than initially thought. However, there is currently no information on how many Slack users use integrations with other applications or what causes the problems.

Here are some of the issues that affected Slack users:

Some channels were seen with an “Internal server error” message. Even though a channel was open and active, users could not see any messages or files in the channel. There was also no notification of a channel being down or offline anywhere on the app.

The auto-resolved channel feature had problems and started to resolve many channels by itself. Slack added that, “This was due to some unexpected behavior in our internal processes.