Slack Suffers Its First Massive Outage Of 2021

As everyone gets back to work after the New Year holiday, Slack brings in 2021 with a massive outage affecting users worldwide.

Starting at approximately 10 AM EST, Slack suffered an outage where users cannot connect, messages cannot be sent and received, and channel history cannot be retrieved.

This outage affects both the desktop client and the web interface, which at the time of this writing is displaying an error stating that they are “investigating the issue.”

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When the outage initially occurred, Slack stated it was affecting messaging and causing connection issues. Since then, it has progressed into an outage across all of Slack’s services.

Slack has restored some of the functionality of the Slack client and can connect again to servers and receive and send messages. You may ned to reload Slack or terminate the process and launch it again before it will connect.

Below are the current updates from Slack’s status page regarding what features are still not working as expected:

Customers may have trouble loading messages or connecting to Slack

For those customers who are unable to access Slack (e.g. seeing a blank screen or error), please try reloading (CTRL/CMD + R). Otherwise, please hold off on reloading, as this could prevent you from accessing Slack.

In addition, Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar aren’t working as expected, and some email notifications (e.g. a notification of a new direct message in Slack) are failing to send.

Jan 4, 1:51 PM EST

Some customers may be able to connect, but may also experience degraded performance. We’re continuing to work to resolve the issue.

Jan 4, 1:00 PM EST

While the issue is largely still ongoing, we believe some customers may see improvement in connecting to Slack after a refresh (CTRL/CMD + R).

Jan 4, 12:29 PM EST

There are no changes to report as of yet. We’re still all hands on deck and continuing to dig in on our side. We’ll continue to share updates every 30 minutes until the incident has been downgraded.

Jan 4, 11:52 AM EST

We’re continuing to investigate connection issues for customers, and have upgraded the incident on our side to reflect an outage in service. All hands are on deck on our end to further investigate. We’ll be back in a half hour to keep you posted.

Jan 4, 11:20 AM EST

We’re still investigating the ongoing connectivity issues with Slack. There’s no additional information to share just yet, but we’ll follow up in 30 minutes. Thanks for bearing with us.

Jan 4, 10:44 AM EST

Customers may have trouble loading channels or connecting to Slack at this time. Our team is investigating and we’ll follow up with more information as soon as we have it. We apologize for any disruption caused.

Jan 4, 10:14 AM EST

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This is a developing story.