Slack starts 2021 with a massive outage

Slack went down on the first full work day of 2021. The company said Monday morning “Customers may have trouble loading channels or connecting to Slack at this time. Our team is investigating and we will follow up with more information as soon as we have it. We apologize for any disruption caused.”

Users began reporting issues around 10AM ET, and the company posted its first status update about the problem at 10:14AM. As of 12:29PM ET, the service appeared to be slowly returning to normal for some users — we here at The Verge were able to transition back to Slack and resume work there at around 1:30PM ET, and we’ve had no disruptions since.

At first, Slack was reporting issues with connecting to the service and messaging. An update on its status page at 11:20AM ET upgraded the situation to a full-blown outage, with all aspects of Slack— including log-ins, messaging, calls, and connections— showing as unavailable. “All hands are on deck on our end to further investigate,” according to the update page.

Slack’s latest update at 1:51PM ET suggests the company is still working to resolve some lingering issues:

For those customers who are unable to access Slack (e.g. seeing a blank screen or error), please try reloading (CTRL/CMD + R). Otherwise, please hold off on reloading, as this could prevent you from accessing Slack.

In addition, Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar aren’t working as expected, and some email notifications (e.g. a notification of a new direct message in Slack) are failing to send.

An update at 3:12PM ET indicated that most of the problems were resolved and the platform was functioning normally, but that some Google and Outlook calendar integrations and email notifications were still not working as expected. “We’re working to resolve this issue, and we’re sorry for the trouble,” the company said.

Slack hasn’t yet said what may have caused the outage, which lasted several hours.

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