Slack, the messaging service used by millions of people for work and school, had a global outage Monday, the first day back for most people returning from the New Year holidays.
It’s the latest technical glitch that shows how disruptive technical problems can be when millions of people rely on just a few services to work and go from home to school during the pandemic.
The company stopped releasing its daily user numbers after it hit 12 million last year.
“Our team is currently investigating and we are sorry for any issues this may cause,” Slack said prepared statement.
The outage started around 10 a.m. Eastern Time and disrupted service in the US, Germany, India, UK, Japan, and elsewhere. At 12:30 PM, service was still sporadic and Slack said the outage was ongoing but some users may start to see improvement. Slack said people should check https://status.slack.com for updates.
Internet service outages are not uncommon, usually resolved relatively quickly, and are rarely the result of hacking or other malicious intent. Google was shut down briefly in December, with people in different countries temporarily unable to access their Gmail accounts, watch YouTube videos, or access their online documents during a Monday outage. Zoom dropped out briefly in August just as many students started the school year at home. And in September, Microsoft services had a five-hour outage.
The outage comes because Slack is currently being acquired by Salesforce.com for $ 27.7 billion. The deal aims to give the two companies a better chance of competing with the old industry powerhouse Microsoft.