Slack, the widely used messaging platform, experienced a major service disruption on Monday when many employees in the United States returned to work after the holidays.
The company called the service problem an “incident” in a statement on its website. “Customers may experience problems loading channels or connecting to Slack at this time,” said the statement. “Our team is investigating and we will follow up with more information as soon as we have it. We apologize for any interruption caused. “
The Downdetector website, which tracks Internet outages, recorded a spike in reported problems with Slack at around 10 am Eastern time, and the company posted its statement about the problem at 10:14 am. log in to the service.
Half an hour later, Slack said he was still investigating. At 11:20 am, the company said it “updated the incident on our part to reflect an interruption in service.” He added: “Everyone is on deck to investigate further.”
Slack has grown in recent years as an essential tool for the workplace, with more than 10 million users, many of them in media organizations and companies that have started working at home because of the coronavirus pandemic. More than 750,000 companies use the service, according to the company, which became a publicly traded independent company in mid-2019.
Salesforce, a company that sells marketing and sales software, announced in December that it would buy Slack for $ 27.7 billion in cash and stock, the latest in a series of big deals showing the demand for tools that allow people to work remotely. . Adobe said in November that it planned to acquire the management software company Workfront for $ 1.5 billion, and Atlassian, which sells developer tools, said it would buy enterprise services company Mindville for an undisclosed amount.
High-level businesses have indicated intense competition in the workplace software market. Other companies with these products, including Airtable, Dropbox and Smartsheet, may be among the potential targets for acquisitions by powerful technology companies. Executives at Slack, founded in 2010, had rejected these offers in the past.
The company has also faced growing competition, especially from Microsoft, which offers a collaboration product called Teams. In July, Slack filed a complaint with the European Commission alleging that Microsoft had unfairly grouped Teams with its Microsoft Office work products, including Word, Excel and PowerPoint.