Wow, that is a fail hosting your status page in the same datacenter/environment as production. Honestly, a bit surprised, since Slack has always seemed on top of things.
I didn't notice an interruption on the desktop client and it's been logged in for about 7 hours now and slack.com looks fine. Interestingly enough https://status.slack.com is currently down while curling status.slack.com returns a page that says it's moved to https://status.slack.com
curl http://status.slack.com
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html><head>
<title>302 Found</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Found</h1>
<p>The document has moved <a href="https://status.slack.com">here</a>.</p>
<hr>
<address>Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu) Server at status.slack.com Port 80</address>
</body></html>
The HTML parts are fallback for if your browser (or curl) in this case doesn't handle a 302
I feel like this is the same sort of argument that opponents of self-driving cars will use - "We shouldn't use self driving cars, because they have problems sometimes and a driver doesn't have recourse to correct it!"
While this might be true, we are still trading more problems for fewer problems. Yes, we can't fix slack when it breaks, but it still breaks a lot less than when we were running our own internal chat client.
Except, of course, that self-driving cars do have a recourse for the driver - manual overrides.
I do see your point, however, and you're correct in that running an internal chat network probably isn't the best course of action for most groups/small business. Luckily, that's what IRC and XMPP networks are for.
What's the real world analogy to Slack being down? Locking your entire team out of the offices?
Since the start, at our company we've used Slack. We have never experienced an outage like this. Definitely a strange and uncomfortable feeling not having Slack available.
I agree. As an aside, Slack has been getting so much usage internally (and everyone learned about @notifications) that it's turned into a massive source of interrupts. It's hard to idle in a number of channels without eventually getting @channel notifications. Perhaps it's a cultural thing here, but there's an expectation that questions are answered immediately unlike email.
I've taken to turning off Slack for periods every day to get work done.
For convenience, the numbers on their status page [1] are:
May 2015 99.999%
April 2015 99.9%
March 2015 99.999%
February 2015 99.995%
January 2015 99.99%
December 2014 100%
November 2014 99.84%
October 2014 99.9%
September 2014 99.998%
At some point Group chat is crossing into tier1 messaging infrastructure and all the sexy things that go along with it, especially when you start charging money.
64 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadGET https://slack.com/favicon.ico 503 Service Unavailable: Back-end server is at capacity
DDoS?
curl http://status.slack.com <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN"> <html><head> <title>302 Found</title> </head><body> <h1>Found</h1> <p>The document has moved <a href="https://status.slack.com">here</a>.</p> <hr> <address>Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu) Server at status.slack.com Port 80</address> </body></html>
The HTML parts are fallback for if your browser (or curl) in this case doesn't handle a 302
http: error: SSLError: hostname 'status.slack.com' doesn't match either of '2015-06-25.dev.slack.com', 'slack.com', 'slack-files.com', 'slack-redir.com', 'slack-redir.net', 'dev.slack.com', '.dev.slack.com', '.enterprise.dev.slack.com', 'dev.slack-files.com', 'dev.slack-redir.com', 'dev.slack-redir.net'
Even if IRC isn't for you, there's XMPP, Mattermost [0], Let's Chat [1], and Zulip [2].
[0]: http://www.mattermost.org/
[1]: https://sdelements.github.io/lets-chat/
[2]: https://github.com/zulip/zulip
Just to add, you can use IRC clients to connect to Mattermost https://twitter.com/mattermosthq/status/668898122630721538
While this might be true, we are still trading more problems for fewer problems. Yes, we can't fix slack when it breaks, but it still breaks a lot less than when we were running our own internal chat client.
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/07/29/427467598/episo...
As an aside, we highly recommend having a contingency plan with another chat system on hot-standby. Here's more: https://sameroom.io/blog/when-team-chat-goes-down-are-you-re...
We plan on beautifying soon.
Since the start, at our company we've used Slack. We have never experienced an outage like this. Definitely a strange and uncomfortable feeling not having Slack available.
What I saw was their twitter status :
> We’re having sporadic connectivity issues, and we’re investigating, and working as hard as we can to resolve them. Updates will follow!
[1] : https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/668879517922914304
I agree. As an aside, Slack has been getting so much usage internally (and everyone learned about @notifications) that it's turned into a massive source of interrupts. It's hard to idle in a number of channels without eventually getting @channel notifications. Perhaps it's a cultural thing here, but there's an expectation that questions are answered immediately unlike email.
I've taken to turning off Slack for periods every day to get work done.
http://i.imgur.com/FiJ4G4i.png
"Let's only show precision that makes us look good."