Slack faces major global outage on first work day of 2021

Communication platform Slack suffered a major outage Monday evening, the first work day for the year for many users across the globe.

The messaging service was down with users reporting issues with accessing and loading Slack Channels. DownDetector had received over 15,000 user complaints on January 4. The service was down for several hours.

“Customers may have trouble loading channels or connecting to Slack at this time. Our team is investigating and we’ll follow up with more information as soon as we have it. We apologize for any disruption caused,” Slack updated its system status page on January 4, Monday at 8:44 PM IST.

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Issues with Google Calendar

Some users also reported issues with Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar integrations.

“For those customers who are unable to access Slack (e.g. seeing a blank screen or error), please try reloading (CTRL/CMD + R). If you can access Slack, please hold off on reloading at this time. In addition, Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar aren’t working as expected, and some email notifications (e.g. a notification of a new direct message in Slack) are failing to send,” Slack wrote on the status page update at 12:21 AM IST on January 5.

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The platform began seeing improvements in error rates at around 12:58 am IST with major issues being resolved at around 1:40 am IST on January 5.

The messaging platform is used by many organisations worldwide for internal communication.