Slack Fixes Partial Outage Disrupting Office Workers’ Chats

(Bloomberg) -- Slack Technologies Inc. experienced outages and degraded performance for more than six hours Monday, disrupting work for thousands of customers who have grown more dependent on the office-chatroom service during the work-from-home period.

“We've confirmed Slack should be working as expected” as of 4:41 p.m. New York time, the company said on its website. “We're continuing efforts on our side to investigate and ensure this trouble doesn't happen again. We'll follow-up here with a summary once we have more information.”

A company spokeswoman had earlier declined to comment on the cause of the disruption that began about 10 a.m., and said Slack knows “how important it is for people to stay connected.”

San Francisco-based Slack has more than 130,000 paid customers around the world and thousands more free users. The software maker's service is a combination of an office chat room and a workflow platform to automate tasks. Monday's incident was the second time in a week that Slack has experienced degraded performance, which the company also reported Sept. 29. Amazon Web Services is Slack's “preferred cloud provider,” but the Amazon.com Inc. unit reported no issues on its status page.

Business employees lose 28 minutes of productivity each time they have an information technology issue, according to research commissioned by Nexthink SA, a European technology company. For large corporations, this could also add as many as millions of dollars in lost work time per year.

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