Slack Down: Work Chat App Suffers Global Outage and 'Degraded Service' as Messages Stop Working

Workplace chat application Slack appeared to be suffering an outage today, with issues affecting users across the United States and Europe.

Users on Twitter have reported messages are repeating and showing multiple times after being sent. "Anyone else's @SlackHQ gone all echoey? People are sending things once but it's coming up 2-3 times," one user wrote. The company said was investigating the reports.

For many businesses, Slack is central to communication. For now staff may be forced to talk in person. "Is it just me or Slack is not delivering message in one go for everyone?" one Twitter user complained. Another added: "Is Slack having issues? Seeing lots of messages fail to send and double/triple posting." A third user noted: "Getting a bunch of 'Slack couldn't send this message' errors while messaging my colleagues. Messages still send though which is weird."

Other users reported server errors and general outages. The official support page, which lists problems in real-time, was then updated to read: "We're looking into an issue."

A Slack statement read: "Some people may be having an issue with Slack. We're currently investigating and will have more information shortly. Thank you for your patience."

Roughly 10 minutes later, the message was updated to confirm there had been degraded service which was affecting multiple features. Slack added: "We received reports of multiple issues regarding Slack's degraded performance, which we are currently investigating."

Yesterday, the company resolved an issue that emerged with workspace analytics not updating properly. "The fix for the workspace analytics is out, and we believe all should be running as expected now. We're very sorry for any confusion this may have caused. If you're still seeing continued issues, we'd be happy to investigate at feedback@slack.com," it said at the time.

It is not immediately clear if the outages are connected. The company suffered a major outage last year as messages could no longer be sent between users, sparking panic online.

On Down Detector, which tracks website problems, Slack users noted that messages editing also appeared to be impacted by the latest bug. Comments indicated it was down around the world, including Sweden, Russia, Argentina, Italy, Czech Republic, Ukraine and Croatia.

Slack is a workplace chat application first released in 2013. The company calls the software a "collaboration hub." It has more than 10 million daily active users in over 150 countries. Slack claim that 65 of the Fortune 100 use its chat application to fuel their businesses.

This is a developing story and will be updated when more information becomes available.