SLACK GOES DOWN ON FIRST DAY BACK TO WORK IN 2021
Messaging platform’s outage affects users across globe
On the first day of the first workweek of 2021, Slack had a meltdown.
The popular workplace chat app confirmed Monday that customers were experiencing trouble connecting to or using the platform but did not share details about the scope or markets affected. But according to the website Downdetector, which displays outage reports in many metropolitan hubs, the disruption affected users throughout the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, France, Japan and beyond.
The service interruptions were first reported at 7:15 a.m. Pacific time. Slack started working again for some users around midmorning. By 11:30 a.m., the company confirmed that service had largely been restored save for a few hiccups.
The San Francisco-based company
though, the sum total of the top 10 donations last year — $2.6 billion — was the lowest since 2011, even as many billionaires vastly increased their wealth in the stock market rally that catapulted technology shares in particular last year. According to the left-leaning Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies, f rom March 18 through Dec. 7, Bezos’ wealth surged by 63 percent, from $113 billion to $184 billion.
Phil Knight, co-founder of Nike, who with his wife, Penny, made the secondand third-largest donations last year according to the Chronicle, increased his wealth by about 77 percent over the same March-to-December period. Knight and his wife gave more than $900 million to the Knight Foundation and $300 million to the University of Oregon.
Fred Kummer, founder of construction company HBE Corp., and his wife, June, gave $300 million to establish a foundation to support programs at the Missouri University of Science and Technology.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, delivered the fourth-largest donation on the Chronicle’s list: a $250 million gift to the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which worked on voting security issues in the 2020 election. Zuckerberg, whose wealth
nearly doubled to $105 billion in the March-to-December period, according to Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies, has been widely criticized and been called to testify before Congress for his company’s handling of disinformation in the runup to the 2020 presidential election.
In the fifth spot was Arthur Blank, co-founder of Home Depot, who gave $200 million through his foundation to Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta to build a new hospital.
Bezos and the Zuckerbergs made up the next spots on last year’s top 10 list, with $100 million donations — Bezos for Feeding America to aid food banks across the country and the Zuckerbergs to the same election security group.
They were followed by Stephen Ross, founder of real estate firm Related Companies; David Roux, co-founder of Silver Lake Partners, a private-equity firm, and his wife, Barbara; George and Renee Karfunkel, real estate investors; Bernard Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot; and Charles Schwab, founder of Schwab Financial Services, and his wife, Helen.
Two billionaires who donated heavily to charity last year — MacKenzie Scott, Bezos’ former wife, and Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter — did not make the Chronicle’s list because no single donation of theirs was large enough to qualify. In February, the Chronicle will publish its list of the 50 biggest donors, which counts cumulative donations, not individual gifts.