Slack hit with ‘severe’ lag as thousands report issues

Slack, the popular workplace instant message service, began experiencing “severe” lag on Wednesday afternoon, according to the company.

“The Slack Engineering team is currently investigating severe latency impacting all Slack services,” Slack wrote on its website just after 4 p.m. Pacific time. “We’ll provide an update as soon as we have more information to share and apologize for any inconvenience this is causing.”

A company dashboard showed problems impacting the service’s login, messaging, notification, search and API capabilities.

More than 3,000 problem reports about Slack had been logged by monitoring site Downdetector around the time of the announcement.

“We continue to investigate the issue, and are‌ implementing fixes to restore services,” the company wrote on its site later on Wednseday. “We’re starting to see some improvements from the fixes implemented so far. We’ll provide another update as soon as we have more information, and again we are sorry for the inconvenience this is causing.”

The Independent has contacted Slack for comment.

Online, Slack users traded notes about the impact of the issue.

“Slack is down, I guess it’s time to pack up for the day,” Kevin Bailey, founder of the healthcare start-up Understood Care, wrote on X.

”Slack is having an incident that’s not reflected in their status page,” AI strategist Patrick Kolencherry wrote on X prior to the announcement from the company.

This is a breaking news story and will be updated with new information.