Returning to work after the Christmas and New Year holidays was even more difficult on Monday than expected.
That’s because Slack, the corporate messaging app that has become a staple for many employees to communicate with each other during the COVID-19 pandemic, crashed globally on its first full workday of 2021.
The company released a statement shortly after 10 a.m. Eastern Time on Monday noting that “customers may have problems loading messages or connecting to Slack,” adding that the team is investigating the problem.
Half an hour later, Slack Technology Inc. WORK,
released another statement noting that it had no additional information to share and wrote, “Thanks for your patience.” The entire system was shut down for a few hours before returning to service around 12:30 p.m. Eastern. The company posted an update explaining that, “While the problem is still largely ongoing, we think some customers will see improvement in their connection to Slack after an update.”
While the service was down, remote workers who were unable to send direct, real-time messages to their bosses and colleagues turned to Twitter to express their frustration, make jokes – or, to feel sorry for that collective “I am not ready to go back to work but still ”feeling, as well as fears that 2021 would be just as chaotic as 2020.
More than 10 million users and 750,000 companies use Slack, the service reports. Slack shares fell slightly during the disruption on Monday morning.
This article has been updated with Slack starting to resume service Monday afternoon.