Workplace app Slack hit with outage on first Monday of 2021

Slack Technologies Inc said its workplace messaging service was hit by an outage on Monday, disrupting remote work as people returned from the holidays.

The company said it was investigating the connection issues affecting users and would continue to share updates every 30 minutes until the incident has been downgraded. More than 15,000 users had initially reported issues, as per outage tracking website Downdectector.

Currently over 4,000 users are still facing issues. Downdetector only tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform.

The outage might be affecting a larger number of users. As companies around the world shift to working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, demand for services provided by Slack and Microsoft Corp’s Teams has gained traction as offices conduct meetings remotely.

The messaging app has added more than 20,000 paid customers in the last two quarters, bringing its total number of paid customers to over 142,000.