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Slack outage: The latest updates on the major disruption

If you had trouble connecting to Slack today, you’re not alone. The popular online and chat-based collaboration platform suffered from another major outage at this time, resulting in issues with login failures for some users. Slack’s connectivity problems were confirmed on the company’s own system status page, where it noted that there are “incidents” with connections at this time.

At the time of its last update at 2:30 p.m. PT, Slack stated that “less than 1% of users may be experiencing trouble connecting to Slack.” All that to say, the majority of the issue seems to have been taken care of.

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This issue had led to a spike in user complaints on the popular website tracking tool Downdetector. The site noted that people began reporting issues with Slack shortly after 8 a.m. PT today, and, at the time of the initial publishing of this post, more were reporting difficulties accessing the app, website, and connecting to Slack’s servers. Issues were reported both in the United States and internationally, with users on Downdetector noting problems in areas such as New Jersey, Florida, New York, South Carolina, Turkey, Sweden, Portugal, Israel, and Finland among other locations.

For some folks, it sure is! We are working on a fix. Thanks for your patience.

— Slack (@SlackHQ) September 30, 2021

According to Downdetector, the problems today follow Slack’s other recent outages reported on August 31, September 7, and September 17.

Given that more people are relying on online collaboration and meeting tools such as Slack — and rivals like Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and Zoom — during the pandemic as more workers are telecommuting remotely, outages during this time can have a larger impact on productivity.

In responses on Twitter, the official profile had responded to complaints, adding that it is “doing [its] best” on readying a fix in time for today. Service is expected to be restored in the next 24 hours, the company stated in its incident report.

“We are aware of connectivity issues related to DNS that are impacting a small subset of users,” Slack added. “This issue was caused by our own change and not related to any third-party DNS software and services. In order to resolve this faster, your ISP (Internet Service Provider) will need to flush their DNS record for slack.com. Please reach out to your networking team to provide them with this information.”

Other than issues with connections, Slack’s status page had shown that other areas were working fine, however. It appeared that the outage wasn’t affecting all users.

If you’re encountering other issues with the collaboration platform, be sure to check out our guide on how to fix some common Slack problems.

Chuong Nguyen
Silicon Valley-based technology reporter and Giants baseball fan who splits his time between Northern California and Southern…
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