Slack suffers major outage on first working day of the year

Communication platform Slack suffered a major outage last Monday, the first work day of the year for many users across the globe. The messaging service was down with users reporting issues with accessing and loading Slack Channels. The service was down for several hours. Down Detector had received over 15,000 user complaints on January 4.

“Customers may have trouble loading channels or connecting to Slack at this time. Our team is investigating and we’ll follow up with more information as soon as we have it. We apologize for any disruption caused,” Slack said while updated its system status.

Later on January 5, the platform began seeing improvements in error rates during the day with major issues resolved.

The messaging platform is used by many organisations worldwide for internal communication.

Meanwhile there is news that Slack has partnered with Amazon in a multi-year agreement wherein Amazon has licensed Slack for all its employees.

Apart from all Amazon employees using Slack, the communications platform will also migrate its voice and video calling features to Amazon’s Chime. This will help increase the adoption of Amazon’s cloud platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Slack had already been using Amazon’s cloud services for its chat app. It will now be committing to make AWS a preferred partner for other important segments including storage, computing, security, database, analytics, machine learning, among others. It will also prefer AWS for future collaboration in developing new features, it is said.

The deal comes amid the platform facing major competition from Microsoft-owned platform Microsoft Teams. It will help both companies to deliver technologies that can take on Microsoft Teams and leverage the video-conferencing segment which has gained massive popularity amid the global pandemic as people are mandated to work and learn from home.

Slack will leverage Amazon’s services as well to better its back end. It is also looking to enhance its mobile experiences and develop video conferencing capabilities for its platform according to a CNBC report. It is also looking to include transcription to its platform.