Slack, the commonly used messaging platform, experienced a serious outage in service on Monday as many employees in the United States returned to work after the holidays.
The company calls the service problem an ‘incident’ in a statement on its website. “Customers are currently having difficulty loading channels or connecting to Slack,” the statement said. ‘Our team is investigating and we will follow up on more information as soon as we have it. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. ”
The website Downdetector, which monitors internet interruptions, recorded an increase in the reported problems with Slack around 10:00 Eastern time. The company posted its statement on the issue at 10:14 p.m. Users could not send messages, load channels, make calls or log in to the service.
Half an hour later, Slack said it was still under investigation. At 11:20 a.m., the company said it had “upgraded the incident on our side to reflect an interruption in service.” It added: “All hands are at the end of our deck to investigate further.”
Slack has grown in recent years as an essential workplace tool, with more than 10 million users, many of whom are in media organizations and companies that have switched to work from home due to the coronavirus pandemic. According to the company, which became an independent listed company by mid-2019, more than 750,000 companies are using the service.
Salesforce, a marketing and sales software company, announced in December that it would buy Slack for $ 27.7 billion in cash and inventory, the latest in a series of major deals showing the demand for tools that people enable remote work. Adobe said in November it was planning to acquire $ 1.5 billion from management software company Workfront, and Atlassian, which sells tools to developers, said it would buy the enterprise service company Mindville for an undisclosed amount.
The sensational transactions indicate intense competition in the software market in the workplace. Other companies with such products, including Airtable, Dropbox and Smartsheet, could be some of the potential targets for acquisitions by powerful technology companies. Managers at Slack, founded in 2010, have turned down such offers in the past.
The company has also faced increasing competition, especially from Microsoft, which is offering a collaborative product called Teams. In July, Slack filed a complaint with the European Commission alleging that Microsoft Teams had unfairly merged with its Microsoft Office work products, including Word, Excel and PowerPoint.