For most people coming back from the New Year’s holiday, Slack, the messaging app used by millions of people for work and education, experienced a global blackout on the first day back.
It’s the new tech glitch to illustrate how destructive technological challenges can be as millions of people depend on only a few systems after the pandemic to function and go to school from home.
Since topping 12 million last year, the firm stopped publishing its daily user count.
Slack said in a prepared statement, “Our team is currently investigating and we’re sorry for any problems this may cause.”
In the U.S., Germany, India, the U.K., Japan, and elsewhere, the disruption started at 10 a.m. Eastern time and interrupted service. Slack said users should search for alerts at https://status.slack.com.
Internet access outages are not unusual, are typically relatively easily fixed, and are only occasionally the result of hacks or other deliberate mischiefs. In December, Google went down briefly, with individuals momentarily unable to update their Gmail accounts, view YouTube videos or access their online records after an outage on Monday in many countries.
In August, just when many students started the school year at home, Zoom went down briefly. And Microsoft services had an outage in September that lasted for five hours.
The downtime comes as Slack is in the process of being purchased for $27.7 billion by Salesforce.com. The goal of the agreement is to give the two businesses a stronger chance to succeed against Microsoft, a long-time industry powerhouse.