Slack starts 2021 with a major outage

Slack has suffered a major outage on the first full working day of 2021.

Users of the business chat platform are reporting that they are unable to reliably send or receive messages, and some Slack users are struggling to log into the service. Some parts of Slack’s website also appear to be inaccessible at the time of writing.

As per Down Detector, users starting reporting problems with Slack at around 3pm GMT, and the outage appears to be affecting users across the globe. The problems had not been resolved at the time of publication. 

“Customers may have trouble loading channels or connecting to Slack at this time. Our team is investigating and we will follow up with more information as soon as we have it. We apologize for any disruption caused.”

The outage comes as employees across the world continue to work remotely as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, and it also comes just weeks after Salesforce announced plans to acquire the platform for £20.7 billion. The deal, which is one of the largest in recent years, will see the two companies form a unified platform for enterprise collaboration with Slack integrated into every Salesforce cloud.

"Together, Salesforce and Slack will shape the future of enterprise software and transform the way everyone works in the all-digital, work-from-anywhere world," said Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff. "I'm thrilled to welcome Slack to the Salesforce Ohana once the transaction closes."