Tough beginning for 2021 with tech glitches hampering communications tools used so much these days for telework.
Slack was down all morning and into the afternoon.
According to DownDetector, people were also having trouble with Gmail, Zoom and Microsoft Teams.
(Thank God we still had Twitter, or else how would we have collectively relished this hilarious prank being played on us by the universe?)
But the Slack outage appeared to be the most disruptive for office workers. The platform was down for hours starting around 10:30 am ET. By 1 pm or so, Slack said some users were able to sign on but may experience “degraded performance.” Around 4, the company said “we believe most customers should be able to connect to Slack again.” (“Believe,” “most,” and “should” didn’t exactly scream confidence, but OK.)
According to Slack, more than 750,000 companies use the communication tool, including CNN (And tbh it’s a miracle we were able to get this newsletter out without it).
Slack and other instant-messaging platforms have only become more vital during the pandemic as millions of people work from home. And just last month, Salesforce announced it was buying Slack for a whopping $27.7 billion — that’s a pretty huge deal for a company that’s just seven years old.
