Slack going down on the first major workday of 2021 gave off serious 2020 vibes.
At least that’s how some employees, including marketing and advertising professionals, felt about the messaging platform’s outage earlier this week.
In addition to an extra day of vacation, the outage gave brands, such as Venmo, the opportunity to seize the moment in real time.
Slack is down, just Venmo me.
— Venmo (@venmo) January 4, 2021
Slack, the Monday after New Years. pic.twitter.com/r60QPnrM1e
— Mashable (@mashable) January 4, 2021
The situation disrupted the workflow of the day for marketing professionals, who took to Twitter for comedic relief.
slack is down? lemme get back in bed pic.twitter.com/xM3vVvB24f
— daniel taroy (@danieltaroy) January 4, 2021
me communicating with coworkers via email while slack is down pic.twitter.com/NgZcoKDjOL
— danny nett ?? (@dannynett) January 4, 2021
Slack being down the first Monday of 2021 is very 2020.
— Morgan DeBaun (@MorganDeBaun) January 4, 2021
relax y’all, slack is just down so they can add Stories to it.
— dan seifert (@dcseifert) January 4, 2021
But as of yesterday today, vacation is… officially over. The workplace messaging platform is back up and running.
While it is unclear how many of the app’s more than 10 million users were affected by the outage, AdAge reported that more than 15,000 people complained, according to the website Downdetector, which monitors service outages on the web. , Slack gave users live updates every 30 minutes as issues were being corrected through its Status dashboard.
As of 3:10 P.M. EST Monday, Slack was back up and running. The company notified users with instructions on how to refresh the page.
“We're truly sorry for the disruption today. We'll be back with a summary of this issue,” the company said in the notice.
This isn’t Slack’s first outage. In 2019 the company lost $8.2 million in revenue after issuing credits to customers whose service was disrupted.
Slack created a separate dashboard for updates on trouble with Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar and email notifications, which persisted throughout the day on Monday. Slack issued a notice at 12:05 AM EST Tuesday morning once all the issues were resolved.
While some may have considered the outage a setback, for others a real-time marketing opportunity and an extra day of vacation might very well be a sign that 2021 is off to a great start.