False start for Slack into the new year
The office communication service Slack was paralyzed for hours on the first workday of the new year due to a glitch. Among other things, users had trouble logging in and sending messages.
Connections to calendar apps and other applications also did not work. The outage affected Slack users in the U.S., Europe, Japan, Brazil and other countries. The service was back up and running largely uninterrupted on Tuesday.
The outage began on Monday afternoon European time - when the working day started in many places in the USA. The causes of the disruption, which lasted around four hours, remained unclear on Tuesday. However, experts expect the company to comment in detail on the breakdown at the start of the 2021 working year.
Transparent communication
Slack had been very transparent about its outages in the past compared to other tech companies. In May, the company published a detailed blog post about server scaling issues that had led to a major disruption of the service.
The outage, which was fixed the same day, was at least partially related to the surge in Slack server usage. Since the outbreak of the Corona pandemic, many employees have been working from home and relying more on office communication services like Slack.
Unfavorable time
For Slack, the problems are additionally inconvenient, as the company is currently in sales talks. Enterprise software giant Salesforce is looking to cost around $28 billion for the acquisition announced in December (Werbewoche.ch reported).
Slack faces stiff competition from Microsoft. With Microsoft Teams, the software giant offers a powerful alternative to Slack, but also to video conferencing offerings like Zoom. (SDA)
