Slack starts new year with major disruption

Slack, the widely used messaging platform, experienced a major disruption in service Monday as many U. S. employees returned towork after the holidays.

The company initially called the service problem an “incident” ina statement on its website, then upgraded it to an outage an hour later.

“Customers may have trouble loading channels or connecting to Slack at this time,” the statement said. “Our team is investigating and we will follow up with more information as soon as we have it. We apologize for any disruption caused.”

The website Down detector, which tracks internet disruptions, recorded a spike in reported problems with Slack at 10 a.m. Eastern time, and the company posted its statement about the problem at 10:14 a.m.

Users could not send messages, load channels, make calls or log in to the service.

Half an hour later, Slack said it was still investigating. At 11:20 a.m ., the company said, “All hands are on deck on our end to further investigate.”

Service began to resume for some users around 12:20 p.m. Eastern.

Itwas not clear how many of Slack’s more than 10 million daily users were affected.

Asked about the extent of the out age and what may have caused it, a Slack representative said therewere no additional details to share.

“Our teams are aware and are investigating the issue,” the representative said.“We know how important it is for people tostay connected andwe are working hard to get everyone running as normal.”

Slack has grown in recent years as an essential workplace tool, with many users in media organizations and companies that have shifted toworking from home because of the coronavirus pandemic.

More than 750,000 companies use the service, according to the company, which became an independent publicly traded company inmid- 2019.

Salesforce, a company that sells marketing and sales software, announced in December that itwould buy Slack for$ 27.7 billion in cash and stock.