Starting about 30 minutes ago, my Slack clients all started having issues connecting to Slack. It went from working to not working in about 10 seconds. I've also been trying to access the Slack Status page with little success. Their Twitter account doesn't seem to be very helpful, but is at least working: https://twitter.com/SlackHQ
We (https://sameroom.io) suggest rigging up a contingency chat solution for situations like these.
Our service can be used to keep key channels synchronized between main and secondary chat systems—to avoid losing context when switching over. Having this in place is particularly important if _your_ outage coincides with team chat outage.
Ditto when AWS or Github go down, as well as everyone who points out why it was obvious to not Slack|Github|AWS. Then the service comes back up and business as usual.
I don't understand why people can't just open up the window and yell to each other, like my impression of New York City in the early 1900s, but hipper and slicker.
Reactiflux - the React.js chat/discussion room moved away from Slack to Discord (https://discordapp.com/) a couple of months back. the reason was: "Slack decided that Reactiflux had too many members and disabled new invites"
All I can say is I sympathise and empathise with their operations team.
Outages happen to everyone, including I'm sure Discord, and what matters most to me is transparency during and after the incident and that both individual and corporate values include incremental improvement - not making the same mistake twice.
I'm perpetually frustrated by HN comments which take a tack of either pointing out (with your benefit of hindsight) things the commenter feels were incorrect, professing they could do better, or the strong advocacy for abandoning ship even with companies who have a provably pretty decent uptime record.
Thankfully their status page[1] is back up, though it was flaking for a bit earlier. Transparency is the most important thing to me.
The status page is what I use to update StatusGator[2] so it can notify you when services go down. It can even notify you by Slack (when it's up) and for that reason I recommend using a second mode as well such as email, SMS, or webhook if you want to get crafty.
That's not exactly a point for slack, since internal slack nets don't exist. I call this "downtime as a service": you get all of the satisfaction an interrupted work day without any of the annoyance of being able to fix it yourself.
The flip side of that is with Slack, you have all the same problems as when your internal IRC server going down, but without the additional productivity loss of internal resources having to drop what they're doing to fix the damn thing.
I wasn't being 100% sarcastic. It's sometimes actually nice to use saas downtime as an excuse to take the day off without being the guy who has to fix it.
Yeah, I don't see a need to have more than one server. Even at gigantic companies, you only need single servers per team. It takes very little to restart a server:
Indeed. It is frustrating that my co-workers have gotten so pissy when I asked them to fall back to the internal IRC server because Slack was so flakey.
Not sarcasm. I'm entirely annoyed with the software industry's constant attempts to make money off problems that were solved by someone else decades ago.
I'm pretty sure this recent instability won't make Slack go out of style. What will likely happen is Slack will continue releasing "features" that don't improve upon IRC and make their product harder to use, until someone else comes along with a simple IRC clone and unseats them just like Slack unseated HipChat. It's an exercise in pointlessness.
Well IRC is able to go down just like Slack, especially if you're using a smaller/private network (I'm not going to run my organisation's 'Slack' on Freenode).
Again, as these things are, the tech has nothing to do with it. Hipchat 'lost' to Slack while being more or less identical (from a raw features/technical point of view). Hell, Slack could be IRC for all I know, but what makes people use Slack is more than what protocol it uses underneath.
I might be alone on this but I find it strange that "XYZ Website is DOWN!!!" is considered news worthy. I mean, if it's down and I care I know it because... it's down. If I don't use it, why do I care again?
But then again, I never read tech crunch anymore because of different but identical crap.
I have to agree. When it's something big and business-critical, like AWS or Azure or some other major host, that's newsworthy, but honestly we should expect something like Slack to go down occasionally. So we can't chat for a few hours on a Monday, email and other business-critical lines of communication are still working just fine.
On the other hand, I don't particularly mind it, either. It's not hurting anything, and maybe we need an excuse to dig up the old "proprietary communication vs IRC" argument now and then, just for kicks.
Slack has become business critical at many companies - quite possibly including TechCrunch (lots of media companies with distributed journalists use Slack to co-ordinate everything).
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadOur service can be used to keep key channels synchronized between main and secondary chat systems—to avoid losing context when switching over. Having this in place is particularly important if _your_ outage coincides with team chat outage.
Here's a post we wrote on this topic: https://sameroom.io/blog/when-team-chat-goes-down-are-you-re...
Call it windowcasting maybe.
Ever hear a New York Echo? No! Heeeeeellloooooooooooooooooo!!!!! ... ... STFU!!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10616743
Just sayin'.
here is a post with more info: https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/10/19/reactiflux-...
Outages happen to everyone, including I'm sure Discord, and what matters most to me is transparency during and after the incident and that both individual and corporate values include incremental improvement - not making the same mistake twice.
I'm perpetually frustrated by HN comments which take a tack of either pointing out (with your benefit of hindsight) things the commenter feels were incorrect, professing they could do better, or the strong advocacy for abandoning ship even with companies who have a provably pretty decent uptime record.
Unfortunately I cannot sympathize with a company which it's valuation is $2.8 billon, and cannot handle staying up or a large userbase.
The status page is what I use to update StatusGator[2] so it can notify you when services go down. It can even notify you by Slack (when it's up) and for that reason I recommend using a second mode as well such as email, SMS, or webhook if you want to get crafty.
1. https://status.slack.com
2. https://statusgator.io
But really, if you run your own IRC server in your own internal network, there will be no netsplits.
I'm pretty sure this recent instability won't make Slack go out of style. What will likely happen is Slack will continue releasing "features" that don't improve upon IRC and make their product harder to use, until someone else comes along with a simple IRC clone and unseats them just like Slack unseated HipChat. It's an exercise in pointlessness.
This. IRC just works. It's not a walled garden.
Again, as these things are, the tech has nothing to do with it. Hipchat 'lost' to Slack while being more or less identical (from a raw features/technical point of view). Hell, Slack could be IRC for all I know, but what makes people use Slack is more than what protocol it uses underneath.
Yeah, it's a combination of slavishly always having to be on the next new thing, and being unable to recognize that this is a problem.
But then again, I never read tech crunch anymore because of different but identical crap.
On the other hand, I don't particularly mind it, either. It's not hurting anything, and maybe we need an excuse to dig up the old "proprietary communication vs IRC" argument now and then, just for kicks.
http://imgur.com/zgYvwmj