Widespread Slack outage reported

On what was, for many, the first working day of 2021, Slack, the collaboration tool which — again, for many — is critical to remote working, reported widespread outages. Slack was acquired by Salesforce before the holidays for $27.7 billion.

We are not taking this as an omen for the year ahead, but it means a sticky start for teams reliant on Slack communications.

Reactions. Slack users consoled themselves by taking to Twitter to express ironic dismay.

Latest. By 1pm ET, many users were able to connect after refreshing. An outage of almost five hours.

Why we care. For one thing, we are Slack users. For another, this is a reminder — too early in the year — of how reliant we’ve become on digital collaboration in this remote work environment, and how quickly things can go wrong.

This story first appeared on MarTech Today.


About The Author

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech Today. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.

Leave a Comment