The three-day Presidents’ Day weekend was shaping up to be a four-day weekend for some office workers in the U.S. on Tuesday morning.
Slack, the business messaging app that’s become a staple for many employees to communicate with each other in real time — and especially important for remote workers during the COVID-19 pandemic — appeared to be down beginning at 9 a.m. ET on Tuesday. This was the very beginning of the first workday for many Americans following a long holiday weekend.
So while Slack service was out, many of the workers unable to direct message each other or their bosses in real-time turned to Twitter
TWTR,
to vent their frustrations and make jokes, instead. The most common sentiment: Slack being down meant that no one would be able to get any work done on a day when they were struggling to feel motivated, anyway.
“If Slack stays down for 15 minutes we legally get to go home,” tweeted one user.
“Does Slack being down mean I don’t have to work today?” tweeted another.
The company first wrote on its status page that “Slack is not loading for some users” at 9:25 a.m. ET. Its 10:23 a.m. ET update elaborated that, “We are continuing to investigate the cause and will provide more information as soon as it’s available.” A company rep told MarketWatch that Slack teams are investigating the issue, and users should follow the Slack status page and @slackstatus Twitter thread for the latest updates.
Salesforce
CRM,
acquired Slack in a $27.7 billion deal in late 2020. More than 10 million users and 750,000 companies use Slack, the service has reported.
A similar outage happened the first Monday of 2021, when Slack crashed worldwide on the first full work day of the new year following the Christmas and New Year’s holidays.
