From Outages to New Funding: It's Been a Strange Summer for Slack

Let's face it; performance hasn't exactly been "smooth sailing" for Slack lately.

The tool was hit by a slew of outages this summer, including:

• A massive 3-and-a-half-hour issue on the 27^th of June
• Another hefty 3-hour outage on the 17^th of July
• "Disrupted" service on the 16^th of August
• A 44-minute outage on the 28^th of August

With 8 million daily active users around the world, and 3 million of those paying for their service, such frequent downtime is starting to have an impact on Slack's reputation. The teams that rely on the collaboration tool for productivity and connectivity are beginning to wonder whether they can trust Slack to keep their organisation up and running.

Time to Pick Up the Slack?

While a couple of outages here and there isn't a big deal for some groups, teams that rely on Slack to manage their discussions with remote workers are left taking to Twitter in outrage. Many users suggest that they might as well take the entire day off when a Slack outage occurs.

As dramatic as it seems for so many people to get distressed about, in some cases, a 44-minute outage, it's impossible to ignore how essential collaboration tools have become in our everyday lives. In fact, the average company uses more than 3 team collaboration apps each day.

As our global relationship with email continues to turn sour, collaborative tools like Slack have been the answer to our real-time messaging prayers. Of course, they're only useful when they actually work.

The issue with Slack may merely be that they've bitten off a little more than they could chew this year. In an interview conducted in May, a representative from the company noted that the business has had some trouble keeping up with its rapid growth at times. In January 2015, Slack only had around 1.1 million daily users. Now, they're dealing with more than 8 million - that's a huge jump in responsibility.

Acknowledging the Issue

The good news is that Slack has recognised the issue.

The brand is always quick to take to social media and address any outages when they occur.

What's more, the technical team is usually ready to jump into action and resolve issues as quickly as possible. Of course, this didn't stop the application from being down for more than three hours at a time at multiple points during the Summer.