1/4/2021
The new year isn’t off to a great start, at least for Slack anyway. The workplace messaging platform suffered a more than three-hour outage on Monday that prevented some users from sending messages or connecting to the service at all. At ACTSmart IT, we use this app internally so I can feel everyone’s pain concerning this outage.

Slack was up and running again for many people around 1:00 pm eastern time, though the company said on its status page that it was still working to completely resolve the issues and that some customers “may experience degraded performance.”

The company confirmed the outage with a post on its status page at 7:14 a.m. “Customers may have trouble loading channels or connecting to Slack at this time,” the company wrote. “Our team is investigating and we will follow up with more information as soon as we have it. We apologize for any disruption caused.”

It’s not clear what caused the outage or when normal service will be fully restored. “We’re continuing to investigate connection issues for customers, and have upgraded the incident on our side to reflect an outage in service, the company posted at 8:20 a.m. PT. “All hands are on deck on our end to further investigate.” A spokesperson for Slack pointed to the @SlackStatus Twitter account for updates.

Slack is in the process of being acquired by business software giant Salesforce for $27.7 BILLION, a deal announced in December. Salesforce intends to integrate Slack into it’s software platform and their goal is to give Microsoft Teams a run for the money.

There are some clear upsides for both companies. Salesforce can tap into a collaboration platform used daily by millions of knowledge workers and open a new front in its battle with Microsoft, while Slack gets to reignite its slowing growth under the ownership of a cloud giant with a global network of the enterprise sales staff.

But what does the acquisition mean for the 142,000 businesses already using Slack, and the 12 million users who fire up the application each workday? Any acquisition involves a degree of uncertainty for existing customers, and Salesforce’s buyout of Slack is no different.

Initial comments from Salesforce indicate that Slack will become the new interface for Customer 360, the data platform that connects Salesforce’s various apps spanning sales, marketing, analytics, workflow integration and more.

The statement announcing the acquisition put it this way: “Slack will be deeply integrated into every Salesforce Cloud. As the new interface for Salesforce Customer 360, Slack will transform how people communicate, collaborate and take action on customer information across Salesforce as well as information from all of their other business apps and systems to be more productive, make smarter, faster decisions and create connected customer experiences.”

That sound pretty much like how Microsoft markets their TEAMS application. Only time will tell where this will end up but you can bet there will be far more competition between Salesforce and Microsoft which usually means good things for all of us consumers.