Slack is down for thousands – we’ve got live updates on the outage and what’s happening

Emoji reactions to messages don’t seem to be working, however. Hardly a crucial part of Slack, but an indication that things could be a tad buggy for a bit as Slack gets back up to speed.

No official word from Slack’s status page that it’s up again. But it appears that we’re coming to the end of this outage. Though those could be famous last words, so to speak.

But my mobile version of Slack is now fine.

According to Desire and Josie, Slack is back for both of them… I’m not so lucky.

However, the desktop app and browser version of Slack is still throwing up ‘trouble loading your workspace’ messages for me.

Oh hang on a minute… both fellow Managing Editor Josie Watson and I have been able to send messages on the Slack app, so this may be the sign of the outage abating.

So I can still see my Slack messages in the mobile app on my iPhone 16 Pro Max, but I can’t send any new ones as one might expect with the outage still in effect. Still that’s handy to check the status of work as a snapshot before the outage hit.

For what it’s worth, I’m quite a fan of the Slack app on iOS. It’s near, works well and feels decently integrated with Apple’s mobile platform.

Another post from Slack:

“Our investigation is still in progress with regard to deprecated functionality for Slack features such as workflows, threads, sending messages and API-related features. We’ll be back with more updates as soon as they’re available.”

Seems like the reports of Slack outages on Downdetector have peaked. So either people have accepted Slack is out or the service is on the road to recovery and might be up soon… we’ll see.

Here’s the latest update from Slack:

“We’re continuing our efforts to restore functionality to affected features such as workflows, sending messages, threads and API-related features. Users may also experience issues when attempting to log-in. We appreciate your continued patience. More updates will be shared as soon as possible.”

And some more for Desire:

A rather regular occurrence

Over the past four years, Slack has had at least one big outage every single year. We had one in January 2021, one in February 2022, March 2022 and July 2022 and the last one was in July 2023.

So the popular business communication platform is not immune to downtimes and the fact that it keeps happening is worrying to say the least.

Wonder how quickly I’ll get sick of seening the image below? Slack is still borked for me.

Thanks to the magic of cloud-based software, I’ve got some insights from Desire Athow, Managing Editor of TechRadar Pro, on the state of play with Slack and what the outage means for businesses.

“Here’s how we’re coping. Slack is a single point of failure for an entire organization, when it went down a few minutes ago, my first thought was, what do we have as an alternative?” he writes.

“Slack is where all real-time communication happens within tens of thousands of businesses including. At the time of writing, Downdetector has thousands instances of outage reported over the past three hours and rising.”

I can’t tell if I’m feeling rather zen from the lack of Slack notification dings, or if I’m feeling rather isolated; the latter is probably down to me also listening to an atmospheric sci-fi soundtrack as I type.

On its service status page, Slack has posted the following:

“We’re still working to restore functionality to affected Slack features such as sending messages, workflows, threads and other API-related features. Users may also experience issues when attempting to log-in. Thank you for your continued patience as we continue investigating. We’ll be following up with further updates as they become available.”

So we’re back to some rather old school communication in the form of email and collaborating in Google Docs. No bad thing, as Google’s G Suite is a rather robust set of tools. Equally, this isn’t exactly optimal.

Usually when outages happen they don’t always directly affect us at TechRadar. But we all use Slack to collaborate remotely and across multiple countries and continents.

So this is a outage I’m really feeling directly; I can’t quickly contact my colleagues in the US, which is a pain when there’s a major Amazon product event going on.

Just got an email from Future Publishing’s (the company that owns TechRadar) IT department that Slack is down across the board.

Ok now he’s just told me his Slack is down. So yeah, this isn’t good for remote collaboration.

But this outage doesn’t appear to be affectinve everyone, as my boss Marc Mclaren reports his Slack is still working… how odd.

Yeah so Slack is definitely down and I’m kinda flying blind with no easy contact with my colleagues.