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It’s a new year and what better way to start working from home for the 10th month of the pandemic than with a Slack outage. For more than 3 hours on Monday 4th January, Slack users were left to fend for themselves with the use of none other than emails! to communicate with their teams – a notion that was surely lost by the 2010’s.
Slack alerted their users at 3.14pm on their Status page:
Customers may have trouble loading channels or connecting to Slack at this time. Our team is investigating and we’ll follow up with more information as soon as we have it. We apologize for any disruption caused.
Jan 4, 3:14 PM GMT
Shortly followed by regular updates on their team’s investigation into the issue before giving a reassuring update at 8.10pm that Slack was back up for business and an apology for causing disruption. By this point, #slackdown was trending on Twitter. It just goes to show the importance of having a public facing Status page where you can update your customers in real time – something we offer as part of our StatusCake package. We understand that communication is key when things go wrong, especially for customer trust and satisfaction and the Slack outage is a perfect example of this.
It couldn’t have come at a worse time for Slack, with CRM giants Salesforce currently acquiring them for a fee of over 25 billion dollars. But with great traffic comes great pressure to stay online, even for the multi-billion companies, and that’s where we lend a hand. We alert you as soon as your website goes down in 43 locations in 30 different countries so you don’t have a bombardment of users on social media telling you something about your website that even you didn’t know. Luckily for Slack, people found a way on social media to entertain themselves during the outage, with many glad not to hear the classic line “you’re on mute” for a while…
So undoubtedly, there are two morals to this story – 1) regardless of our current situations, the public are indeed, pretty hilarious and 2) StatusCake can be the answer to your outage problems so you can stay online or get yourself back online quicker and more efficiently.
Happy 2021!
Kat Holmes
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