Slack, the widely used professional communication platform, experienced an outage that affected many users in the western region yesterday. The disruption occurred from 12:06 PM ET to 1:56 PM ET in the afternoon. However, for a subset of users, the downtime persisted until 5 PM in the evening, disrupting their work throughout the day.
Soon after the outage, individuals from the technology sector turned to platforms like Twitter, X, and Facebook to express their frustration. Given that numerous teams rely heavily on this feature-rich messaging platform for various tech projects, the downtime proved particularly disruptive, even functioning reasonably well with limited internet speeds.
A segment of users turned to Reddit from X, attributing the app crash to a cyber attack orchestrated by a well-known cybercriminal gang based in Asia. The company, however, clarified that the downtime was a result of technical glitches rather than a DDoS attack, as erroneously reported by a certain section of the media.
Simultaneously, Slack’s website and app faced downtime, leading to a significant number of users employed by Fortune 100 companies losing access to their work-related resources. Consequently, this denial of access resulted in the loss of productive work hours for the week. The two-hour downtime, which extended to more than four hours for certain users, is projected to have caused financial losses to various teams, rendering them unable to meet project deadlines for the week. The potential extension of project timelines might necessitate additional expenditures, thereby impacting the overall project’s status.
Note 1: A similar incident occurred in July of this year when the company’s website and app encountered a similar crash, resulting in an hour of downtime. The subsequent explanation from the online business clarified that the disruption arose from a misconfiguration error.
Note 2: A recent statement from the security firm Recorded Future disclosed that hackers are leveraging platforms like Slack to conceal malware and utilize them as distribution points within networks. Specifically, the firm identified a hacking group named BlueBravo, associated with Russian APT29 or Nobelium, alleging their involvement in targeting numerous American national companies to extract intelligence.
