Returning to work after the Christmas and New Year holidays was even harder than expected on Monday.
This is because Slack, the business messaging app that became an essential element for many workers to communicate with each other during the COVID-19 pandemic, crashed worldwide in the first full working day of 2021.
The company released a statement on Monday shortly after 10 a.m. Eastern Time, noting that “customers may have trouble uploading messages or connecting to Slack,” adding that its team is investigating the issue.
Half an hour later, Slack Technology Inc. WORK
released another statement, noting that it had no additional information to share, writing “Thank you for carrying us.” The entire system was shut down for a few hours before returning to operation around 12:30 p.m. The company posted an update explaining that “Although the issue is largely still ongoing, we believe some customers may see improvements in connecting to Slack after a refresh.”
While the service was shut down, remote workers, unable to send direct, real-time messages to their bosses and colleagues, turned to Twitter to express their frustration, break jokes – or, to compensate for that collective “I’m not ready to go back to work anyway” the feeling, as well as the fears that 2021 is shaping up to be as chaotic as 2020.
More than 10 million users and 750,000 companies use Slack, the service reported. Weak stocks fell slightly during the disturbance on Monday morning.
This article has been updated, and Slack will resume service on Monday afternoon.