Slack, the widely used messaging platform for work and education, experienced a global outage on Monday, disrupting services across the US, Germany, India, the UK, Japan, and other regions. The disruption occurred on the first working day after the New Year holiday, highlighting the reliance on such online tools during the pandemic.
Slack acknowledged the issue in a statement, saying, “Our team is currently investigating and we’re sorry for any troubles this may be causing.” The outage began around 10 am Eastern Time, with many users reporting service restoration by 1 pm, though Slack warned of possible degraded performance.
The platform, launched in 2013, has become a staple in workplaces, with over 12 million daily users as of 2020. Slack went public in 2019 and is currently being acquired by Salesforce.com for $27.7bn. Shares were down about 1% late Monday morning.
This is not the first outage for Slack; similar incidents occurred in 2019. In its September earnings report, the company disclosed $8.2m in revenue loss from issuing credits to affected customers, leading to a 14% stock drop. Internet service outages are typically resolved quickly and are rarely due to hacking.
