Slack outage stymies some business users

February 23, 2022

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Some Slack users were unable to access the popular collaboration app on Tuesday.

The outage was first reported by Slack at 9:25 a.m. ET as many US workers returned to work following the President’s Day holiday weekend. Thousands of Slack users reported problems loading the app on DownDetector.com; the problems had not yet been fully resolved by noon ET.

“Slack is not loading for some users,” the company had acknowledged at 10:23 a.m. ET on its service status page. “We are continuing to investigate the cause and will provide more information as soon as it’s available.”

At 12:07 p.m., Slack pointed to “signs of improvement. Please try reloading Slack, and if not a cache reset. We’re still monitoring the situation. We’ll confirm once this issue is fully resolved.”

DownDetector.com shows the Slack outage.

For users still having issues as of about 1:45 p.m. ET, the company offered this advice: “We’re continuing to see improvements, but we still have some work to do. If you’re still encountering any trouble, please reload Slack using Command + Shift + R (Mac) or Ctrl + Shift + R (Windows/Linux) or clear the app cache (Help > Troubleshooting > Clear Cache and Restart on desktop, Preferences > Advanced > Reset Cache on mobile).”

The company finally reported at 2:24 pm ET that operations were back to normal.

Slack, which was acquired by Salesforce last year for $27.7 billion, has more 12 million daily active users. That’s according to its most recently released stats from October 2019, so it’s likely the number is considerably higher now.

While Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendors typically provide high levels of uptime, outages are not uncommon. Slack was one of a number of SaaS vendors knocked offline last December due to an outage at cloud provider Amazon Web Services’ US East 1 data center apparently related to network device failure. Slack’s services were also disrupted last September as a DNS configuration change created issues for some users.