Slack, the messaging service used by millions of people for work and school, had a global break on Monday, the first day for most people returning to the New Year holidays.
This is the latest technological problem to indicate how disruptive technical problems can be if millions of people depend on just a few services to go to school during the pandemic.
The company stopped releasing its daily user count after reaching $ 12 million last year.
“Our team is currently investigating and we are sorry for the problems it could cause,” Slack said prepared statement.
The outage began around 10 a.m. Eastern time and disrupted service in the U.S., Germany, India, the United Kingdom, Japan and elsewhere. At 12:30 the service was still sporadic, and Slack said the outage was ongoing but that some users might see improvement. Slack said people should check https://status.slack.com for updates.
Interruptions on the internet service are not uncommon, are usually resolved relatively quickly and are only rarely the result of burglary or other intentional mischief. Google briefly declined in December, with people in multiple countries temporarily not having access to their Gmail accounts, watching YouTube videos or accessing their online documents during a Monday break. In August, Zoom went down briefly just as many students started the school year at home. And in September, Microsoft services had a five-hour outage.
The break comes as Slack is raising $ 27.7 billion through Salesforce.com. The deal is aimed at giving the two companies a better chance of competing with Microsoft’s long-standing powerhouse.