Disney has dropped Slack as its company-wide collaboration platform of choice in favour of Microsoft Teams.
Status reported a leaked internal memo detailing that the entertainment and hospitality behemoth plans to discontinue using Slack's messaging services by the end of Q1 FY25, which is a few months away, because of a significant leak of messages and documents earlier this summer.
Business Insider followed up on this story last week by reporting the proposed move to Teams, which has catalysed employee concerns about leveraging Microsoft's popular platform as an alternative.
Disney CFO Hugh Johnston wrote in the memo:
I would like to share that senior leadership has made the decision to transition away from Slack across the company. Our technology teams are now managing the transition off Slack by the end of Q1 FY25 for most businesses."
Johnston mentioned that phasing out Slack in "more complex use cases" could take additional time, with the transition expected to occur a quarter later.
The announcement follows claims by the hacking group Nullbulge that they had breached Disney's internal Slack messages over the summer. Wired reported that the hacking group accessed over 1.1 TB of internal content, including 44 million Slack messages and 10,000s of documents that encompassed internal projects, financial positions and strategies, and customers' and employees' personal details.
The Wall Street Journal reported reading some of the leaked Disney Slack files in July. A Disney spokesperson informed the Journal that the company was investigating the incident at that time. According to the Journal, the breach transpired after a computer belonging to a Disney software development manager was compromised. Data was stolen from both public and private Slack channels, but private messages remained unaffected.
"Much more information, training resources, and best practices for optimal work-related collaboration and reinforcement of policies regarding secure handling of sensitive information will be shared over the coming weeks by your respective technology teams," Johnston wrote.
A Business Insider source outlined that some Disney employees were disgruntled with the prospective move to Teams. The source shared screenshots with Business Insider from the anonymous workplace forum Blind, which mandates users to have an organisation email address to access and post in a specific company channel.
Several employees expressed concerns that cost-saving measures drove the shift to Teams. They feared losing longstanding Slack integrations and archived content, which they believed could reduce productivity.
