Slack’s down for some people, so now’s the time to take a walk

Slack appears to be having issues for some people, with reports coming in of users who can’t connect to the service, receive errors when trying to send messages, and can’t even access Slack’s website. The issue doesn’t appear to affect everyone, and Slack hasn’t gone as far as calling it an outage on its status page. The differences in experiences point to a possible routing issue or the even more likely culprit, DNS (it’s always DNS).

Some of my co-workers have had issues today, while it’s working fine for others (including, unfortunately, me). It’s unclear how widespread the issues are — DownDetector only shows a thousand or so reports.

The company says it’s working on a fix for the issue, but the incident report page says it’s been ongoing since around 12:30PM ET, or 9:30AM PT.

If Slack is mission critical to your work, you could try using your phone’s connection instead of Wi-Fi, logging in and out of the service or your VPN if you’re using one, or trying a different Wi-Fi network if you have access to one. If all that fails, maybe it’s the universe telling you to take a walk or cook yourself something nice. When the chat app eventually comes back, it’ll probably do so in a bit of a wave — you can just tell your boss that it came back a little later for you and that you were really trying to message them about that draft, honest.