If you’re having trouble connecting to Slack today, you’re not alone. The popular online and chat-based collaboration platform is suffering another major outage at this time, resulting in issues with login failures for some users. Slack’s connectivity problems were confirmed on the company’s own system status page, where it’s noted that there are “incidents” with connections at this time.
This issue has led to a spike in user complaints on the popular website tracking tool Downdetector. The site noted that people began reporting issues with Slack shortly after 8 a.m. PT today, and, at the time of this writing, more were reporting difficulties accessing the app, website, and connecting to Slack’s servers. Issues were reported both in the United States and internationally, with users on Downdetector noting problems in areas such as New Jersey, Florida, New York, South Carolina, Turkey, Sweden, Portugal, Israel, and Finland among other locations.
For some folks, it sure is! We are working on a fix. Thanks for your patience.
— Slack (@SlackHQ) September 30, 2021
According to Downdetector, the problems today follow Slack’s recent outages reported on August 31, September 7, and September 17.
Given that more people are relying on online collaboration and meeting tools such as Slack — and rivals like Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and Zoom — during the pandemic as more workers are telecommuting remotely, outages during this time can have a larger impact on productivity.
In responses on Twitter, the official profile has responded to complaints, adding that it is “doing [its] best” on readying a fix in time for today. Service is expected to be restored in the next 24 hours, the company stated in its incident report.
“We are aware of connectivity issues related to DNS that are impacting a small subset of users,” Slack added. “This issue was caused by our own change and not related to any third-party DNS software and services. In order to resolve this faster, your ISP (Internet Service Provider) will need to flush their DNS record for slack.com. Please reach out to your networking team to provide them with this information.”
Other than issues with connections, Slack’s status page showed that other areas are working fine, however. It appears that the outage isn’t affecting all users. If you are experiencing an outage with Slack right now, you may have to rely on more traditional forms of communication with other members of your organization, like using email, phone calls, text (SMS) messages. And if you’re encountering other issues with the collaboration platform, be sure to check out our guide on how to fix some common Slack problems.
We will update this post with more information as the service recovers from the outage.