LOL, Slack Stopped Working, & People Are Calling It A "WFH Snow Day"

On Monday, Oct. 5, many remote and in-office workers had their work day interrupted by an unexpected blip in what has become one of the most widely-used work communication tools: Slack. Forget productivity, because these tweets about Slack being down on Oct. 5 celebrate what's basically the adult equivalent of a snow day. In response to an Elite Daily email inquiring about the outage, a Slack spokesperson said, "Our teams are aware and are investigating the issue. We know how important it is for people to stay connected and we are working hard to get everyone running as normal. For the latest updates please keep an eye on @slackstatus and status.slack.com."

On Monday morning, employees around the world were forced to put their plans for a productive beginning of the week on hold as numerous people reported issues with Slack. Starting at 9:05 a.m. CST, Slack began posting about the issues on its status page, saying "Some users may be experiencing slowness with Slack in the desktop, browser and mobile at this time. The issue is impacting sending messages and troubles with API calls. Our team is looking into it and we will follow up with more updates in 30 minutes."

As of noon CST, the tech company revealed that they were still working on resolving the performance issues, which include problems with the search functionality, placing API calls, lost messages, and slow connectivity.

With more people than ever working from home due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, numerous Slack users headed to Twitter to freak out while also celebrating the fact that the outage had basically given everyone an adult snow day by making it near-impossible for them to stay connected with their managers and fellow colleagues. Is work effectively canceled for the day? It depends on who you ask.

The hashtag #SlackDown quickly started trending on Twitter, and the numerous tweets and memes on the subject are a reminder of just how much people have come to rely on Slack to manage their workloads and stay connected with their coworkers. At the moment, there's no telling when Slack will be back to its full capabilities and you'll be able to share that hilarious GIF in the group chat, but in the meantime, you can head to Twitter to commiserate with the internet on the unexpected development and, worse case scenario, send an email or text to keep the lines of communication open.