Is Slack down? Business users report outages globally

Slack's app on a smartphone
(Image credit: Shutterstock)

Business communications and collaboration platform Slack is currently experiencing outages for “some users” across the globe.

Some businesses are currently unable to load their workspaces, sign out of accounts, or use any features on the platform including messaging and calling colleagues.

“Some customers may be experiencing issues with loading Slack,” the company said in a tweet from its status-checking account. “We'll provide a status update once we have more information. We're sorry for the disruption.”

Slack first started investigating the issue at 14:25 PM (GMT), according to its status page, and provided an update at 14:44 PM (GMT) saying “we’re still working towards a full resolution. We’ll be back with another update soon. Thank you for your patience.”

Its most recent update, at the time of writing, came at 15:23, an hour after the first acknowledgement of issues. Slack said it is continuing to investigate the issues but did not add any insights into what was causing it or how many users are affected.

According to affected users, the platform appears to be inaccessible through its desktop and web apps, and the platform is failing to load for smartphone users too.

Viewpoint of affected Slack customers

Viewpoint of affected Slack customers

Users have attempted to sign out and sign back into Slack, but users on computers are met with ‘sign out’ links that do not work, while mobile users receive an error saying they must be connected to a network in order to sign out.

Other Slack users seem to be less affected by the service issues, only reporting faults with threads and direct messages.

Service outages are common with collaboration platforms and are usually resolved expeditiously.

The outage will be impacting a large number of organisations worldwide. Slack last reported its daily active user (DAU) figures in 2019, saying it had more than 10 million at the time.

Connor Jones
News and Analysis Editor

Connor Jones has been at the forefront of global cyber security news coverage for the past few years, breaking developments on major stories such as LockBit’s ransomware attack on Royal Mail International, and many others. He has also made sporadic appearances on the ITPro Podcast discussing topics from home desk setups all the way to hacking systems using prosthetic limbs. He has a master’s degree in Magazine Journalism from the University of Sheffield, and has previously written for the likes of Red Bull Esports and UNILAD tech during his career that started in 2015.