Slack kicks off the first Monday of 2021 with a widespread outage [Mostly fixed]

As the first work week of 2021 has kicked off today, Slack is seeing what looks like a widespread outage that’s preventing users from sending messages, loading channels, or in some cases connecting at all.

12:10 pm PT:

For any customers unable to access Slack, please refresh using CMD/CTRL + SHIFT + O. If you encounter any trouble, please let us know at feedback@slack.com.

We’ll have a separate post on this site for the outstanding calendar apps and email notifications trouble.

We’re truly sorry for the disruption today. We’ll be back with a summary of this issue.

Note: we have edited the message to ask users to refresh their client entirely, as opposed to the reload instructions we shared before (CMD/CTRL + R).

11:28 am PT:

We’re seeing improvements with error rates on our side, and we believe affected customers should be able to access Slack.

We’re continuing to work to resolve the trouble with calendar apps and email notifications.

10:51 am PT:

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.

10:00 am PT: “Some customers may be able to connect, but may also experience degraded performance. We’re continuing to work to resolve the issue.”

9:29 am PT: Slack says “While the issue is largely still ongoing, we believe some customers may see improvement in connecting to Slack after a refresh (CTRL/CMD + R).”

8:52 am PT: No luck yet with Slack solving the outage or discovering more…

Update 8:20 am PT: Slack shared that this is officially an outage and “All hands are on deck.” We’ll learn more in about 30 minutes.

We’re continuing to investigate connection issues for customers, and have upgraded the incident on our side to reflect an outage in service. All hands are on deck on our end to further investigate. We’ll be back in a half hour to keep you posted.

As we often see with Slack outages, today’s issues come and go for some with delays to receiving and sending messages or seeing failed messages.

However, it sounds like the Slack downtime is worse for some as the company notes that “Customers may experience issues connecting to Slack to loading channels at this time.”

No word yet on what’s causing the problem but Slack is working on a solution.

The outage started around 7 am PT this morning. Thousands of users are reporting the issue on Down Detector, with 70% of them so far noting they’re not able to connect to Slack and 28% having trouble sending messages. There are reports coming in from all over the world about the outage.