It's not you, it's Slack: Chat app falls down – and at such a very convenient moment

Updated Slack is down – in the middle of a pandemic during which millions are working from home and reliant on collaboration tools.

The service noticed something was awry at May 13, 9:53 AM GMT+10 when it posted news that: “Users have reported general performance issues such message sending failures and timeouts. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and will provide an update shortly.”

Nine minutes later came a slightly more definitive: “Users are unable to connect to Slack. We are investigating and will provide an update shortly.”

And 20 minutes downstream from that … silence.

The chat platform hasn’t had a great day, earlier reporting “degraded performance.”

Users may have experienced degraded performance but we have investigated and are now in the clear. https://t.co/9hMIuvJPVX

— Slack Status (@SlackStatus) May 12, 2020

Reaction to the outage has been predictable, with the tweet below representative...

Slack going down + everyone WFH pic.twitter.com/XBx8rdgsI4

— Hen Chow (@HenHen_C) May 13, 2020

All of which leaves The Register trying to re-install Pidgin and remember our Yahoo! Messenger passwords so that we can resume instant-message action, without resorting to Facebook, while pondering how to adapt our infamous TITSUP acronym for the occasion.

Terribly Ill-Timed Slack Unavailability Problem anyone? ®

Updated to add

Minutes after publishing this article, Slack got back on its feet, and you may be able to get through to it, though its status page still says it's down. Your mileage may vary.