Slack is back and running smoothly, so get back to work everyone!

Yeah so Slack is definitely down and I'm kinda flying blind with no easy contact with my colleagues.

But this outage doesn't appear to be affectinve everyone, as my boss Marc Mclaren reports his Slack is still working... how odd.

Ok now he's just told me his Slack is down. So yeah, this isn't good for remote collaboration.

Just got an email from Future Publishing's (the company that owns TechRadar) IT department that Slack is down across the board.

Usually when outages happen they don't always directly affect us at TechRadar. But we all use Slack to collaborate remotely and across multiple countries and continents.

So this is a outage I'm really feeling directly; I can't quickly contact my colleagues in the US, which is a pain when there's a major Amazon product event going on.

So we're back to some rather old school communication in the form of email and collaborating in Google Docs. No bad thing, as Google's G Suite is a rather robust set of tools. Equally, this isn't exactly optimal.

On its service status page, Slack has posted the following:

"We're still working to restore functionality to affected Slack features such as sending messages, workflows, threads and other API-related features. Users may also experience issues when attempting to log-in. Thank you for your continued patience as we continue investigating. We'll be following up with further updates as they become available."

I can't tell if I'm feeling rather zen from the lack of Slack notification dings, or if I'm feeling rather isolated; the latter is probably down to me also listening to an atmospheric sci-fi soundtrack as I type.

Thanks to the magic of cloud-based software, I've got some insights from Desire Athow, Managing Editor of TechRadar Pro, on the state of play with Slack and what the outage means for businesses.

"Here’s how we're coping. Slack is a single point of failure for an entire organization, when it went down a few minutes ago, my first thought was, what do we have as an alternative?" he writes.

"Slack is where all real-time communication happens within tens of thousands of businesses including. At the time of writing, Downdetector has thousands instances of outage reported over the past three hours and rising."

Wonder how quickly I'll get sick of seening the image below? Slack is still borked for me.

And some more for Desire:

A rather regular occurrence

Over the past four years, Slack has had at least one big outage every single year. We had one in January 2021, one in February 2022, March 2022 and July 2022 and the last one was in July 2023.

So the popular business communication platform is not immune to downtimes and the fact that it keeps happening is worrying to say the least.

Here's the latest update from Slack:

"We're continuing our efforts to restore functionality to affected features such as workflows, sending messages, threads and API-related features. Users may also experience issues when attempting to log-in. We appreciate your continued patience. More updates will be shared as soon as possible."

Seems like the reports of Slack outages on Downdetector have peaked. So either people have accepted Slack is out or the service is on the road to recovery and might be up soon... we'll see.

Another post from Slack:

"Our investigation is still in progress with regard to deprecated functionality for Slack features such as workflows, threads, sending messages and API-related features. We'll be back with more updates as soon as they're available."

So I can still see my Slack messages in the mobile app on my iPhone 16 Pro Max, but I can't send any new ones as one might expect with the outage still in effect. Still that's handy to check the status of work as a snapshot before the outage hit.

For what it's worth, I'm quite a fan of the Slack app on iOS. It's near, works well and feels decently integrated with Apple's mobile platform.

Oh hang on a minute... both fellow Managing Editor Josie Watson and I have been able to send messages on the Slack app, so this may be the sign of the outage abating.

However, the desktop app and browser version of Slack is still throwing up 'trouble loading your workspace' messages for me.

According to Desire and Josie, Slack is back for both of them... I'm not so lucky.

But my mobile version of Slack is now fine.

No official word from Slack's status page that it's up again. But it appears that we're coming to the end of this outage. Though those could be famous last words, so to speak.

Emoji reactions to messages don't seem to be working, however. Hardly a crucial part of Slack, but an indication that things could be a tad buggy for a bit as Slack gets back up to speed.

My colleagues are reporting they have access to Slack on desktop on both Windows and macOS.

But I had to restart my MacBook and Slack fully logged me out and seems to be struggling to authenticate me via my Google Workspaces account. Mildly frustrating, I have to say.

Going by Slack's status page it doesn't look like everything has been ironed out yet:

"We're still working to restore functionality to affected Slack features such as sending messages, workflows, threads and other API-related features. We'll be back with more updates as soon as they're available."

According to Downdetector, there were also outages at Amazon Web Services, Instagram Microsoft Copilot, among others. Now it's unclear if these are related, but a lot of services use AWS for their cloud platform, so if that went down it could be the crux of these outages.

Still no desktop Slack login for me. Pretty sure I'm not doing anything odd on my end...

This is all I'm seeing when I try to log into Slack. Getting infuriating now.

Another update from Slack's status page, and it reads much the same as before:

"We’re still actively investigating this issue, but we don’t have any new information to share at this time. Thanks for sticking with us as we continue to work towards a fix. We’ll keep you posted as soon we have an update."

I'm not the only one with no Slack desktop access as my colleague Mackenzie Frazier is also in the same boat, and I think a few others are too. But with communication a tad stifled it's hard to tell.

Another update from Slack:

"We’re still looking into the cause of the issue and working on restoring functionality to affected features such as workflows, sending messages, threads and API-related features. Users may also continue to experience issues when attempting to log-in. We’ll provide new information as soon as it’s available."

Still no joy on desktop login for me on Slack. Sigh.

My boss, Marc Mclaren has got back into the desktop version of Slack. I'm still stuck in limbo...

And Slack has apologized for the ongoing troubles:

"No additional news to share just yet, but we’re focused on getting things back to normal as quickly as we can. We apologize for the continued trouble."

Here's a new update from Slack:

"We identified the cause of the issue and are continuing to monitor our health metrics, but we are still not fully resolved. Some users may still reproduce symptoms such as issues loading their workspaces. Our work is still ongoing to restore affected backend services to returning functionality to impacted features."

I'm still stuck in sign-in limbo with the Slack on desktop, and this seems consistent with what Slack has reported on its status page. As such, it would seem like issues will persist for some people while others appear to have got fully functional Slack access.

While Slack has been back for some on both desktop and mobile, as of 10:30 pm ET, the company's status page is still showing some issues with 'Messaging' as well as 'Apps/Integrations/APIs,' stating, "Something's not quite right." for both.

It's likely it could take a few more hours for it be fully back to normal, for what it's worth, I am able to send messages on desktop and mobile, but can only react with an emoji on the latter. That functionality has yet to return on the desktop, even with a few app restarts.

Slack's outage certainly created quite the storm today, that's for sure.

Slack is fully up and running. So everyone can breathe easy... and get back to work.