Slack is down on the first workday of 2021

The messaging platform records its first outage of the year on the first week of the year.

What you need to know

• Slack has gone down for many worldwide.
• The company this morning confirmed connectivity issues preventing customers from sending messages or connecting to Slack as a whole.
• Slack says it’s investigating the issue and plans to have a fix soon.

They say start the year as you mean to go on, but perhaps Slack shouldn’t take that too literally. The communications platform is now experiencing slowed down service, preventing some people from sending or receiving messages.

The company acknowledged this outage at around 10 AM ET, sharing the following update on its status page:

Customers may have trouble loading channels or connecting to Slack at this time. Our team is investigating and we will follow up with more information as soon as we have it. We apologize for any disruption caused.

As more and more people work from home, remote communication systems like Slack are key to managing employee communications and keeping teams in sync with each other. Whereas Slack outages pre-2020 could be remedied by a walk across the room to a co-worker’s desk, it’s not so for most in 2021. Slack will presumably be up and running in a matter of hours, but it’s a weak start to a year for a company et to see a surge in demand.