Slack went down for many users on Tuesday morning, throwing companies that rely on the popular workplace communication platform as workers returned from an extended holiday weekend.
“We are investigating an issue where Slack is not loading for some users,” the company said on its status page at approximately 9:30 p.m. ET. For some users, the problem persisted throughout the morning. The company said that the issue was completely resolved after about five hours.
Slack and similar services have emerged as essential tools for office workers to stay connected with their colleagues during the pandemic. The company provides service to major companies including Netflix, Uber and Target, as well as government agencies such as the US Department of Veterans Affairs. Many news organizations, including CNN, also rely on the platform. Slack was acquired by Salesforce (CRM) last year.
"There's slack down which means work has been cancelled," one Twitter user joked on Tuesday. Others joked that they were worried they had been fired, before realizing it was just an outage.
Outage tracking website Down Detector showed a problem report about Slack spiking around 9:30 a.m. ET, before turning down a bit.
About an hour after the outage was confirmed, some users started reporting that their service had restarted, especially on the mobile app. However, Slack said that others were still unable to load the platform and that it was continuing to investigate the issue as of 11:30 a.m. ET.
Shortly after noon ET, Slack said it was "seeing signs of improvement." And just before 2:30 p.m. ET, Slack said it has fully resolved the issue, but did not provide an explanation for the outage. The company encouraged users to reload the service or, if that doesn't work, to reset the cache.
"Thank you for working with us and we apologize for interrupting your work day!" Said it.