Slack down: Work chat app goes down as the working day begins

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Slack, the workplace chat app, has briefly stopped working for some of it users.

The app went offline on Friday morning, UK time, just as the working day began. Around two hours later, it was back up and users were able to chat again.

Users saw an array of error messages, indicating that “something went wrong”.

Slack’s status page initially showed that the site was up as usual, and that it was not aware of any problems. But a wide array of users reported problems on Twitter, and tracking website Down Detector showed a large outage.

On that status page, Slack eventually said that “some customers are encountering various errors in Slack”. It said later it was “seeing things get back to normal”, and that it was “continuing to investigate the root cause of the connection issues”, though it gave no information about what those problems were.

Slack has suffered a number of technical issues over the summer, with the app going offline during the workday multiple times. But those outages have usually been fixed within hours.

Next week, Slack employees will be given time off by parent company Salesforce because they are behind on internal training, according to a recent report in Fortune. There is nothing to indicate that lack of training is related to any outage.

The company also launched its biggest ever redesign in August, with new ways of organising conversations and an attempt to tidy up chats and show off new features. Again, there is nothing to indicate that the new look is related to the problems.