"Hey guys, remember when _all of IRC_ went down?"<p>Obviously this sucks and I feel bad for all of those affected, especially the people fixing this or who depended on Slack for their workflow.<p>But it's hard to overstate the dangers of over-centralisation like this, and I say it as a person who uses Slack professionally.<p>Maybe running your own Zulip instance isn't as sexy or has the same integrations, but at least you can have a person responsible for fixing it and get status updates, and ultimately: as much as Ops is a dirty word; being able to plan your downtimes can help a _lot_.
Interesting! I co-host a podcast about notable internet outages, and our very episode was about Slack's Jan 1 outage: <a href="https://downtimeproject.com/podcast/episode-1-slack-vs-tgws/" rel="nofollow">https://downtimeproject.com/podcast/episode-1-slack-vs-tgws/</a><p>If they publish a good postmortem on this, we'll definitely do an episode about it.
I wonder if any companies have experimented with intentional occasional slack 'outages'?<p>Maybe 1-3pm daily?<p>I've seen some of the Gitlab Gospels that describe how to not use slack or whatever messaging tool they use in excruciating detail, and it made me think...<p>...if it requires this much instruction on how _not_ to use it, then maybe there is a tool that is a bit more intuitive.
I recognize the ways in which this is a difficult problem, but it remains frustrating to me that the application isn't capable of providing this information directly to end users. Instead you end up with confusion, missed communication, and occasionally people thinking they've been fired! Surely we can do better.
> Reloading Slack (Command + R / Ctrl + R) may help Slack to load as expected.<p>Well, it went from readable to "Server Error something went wrong". I haven't seen the entire slack app 500 before!
I started using slack about two years ago, and in my opinion they have a quality problem. There are just too many issues that crop up when they roll out change.<p>It reeks of the "just get it done" anti-pattern where done is change that hasn't had the chaos tracked down and killed.<p>I bet internally they are waiting for bugs to get reported instead of pro-actively running the changed software under representative load to hunt and kill chaos.