Slack stopped working for many people across the United States on Tuesday, leaving users unable to send messages, open chat channels or read old threads. More than 2,000 people reported the problem to Downdetector as complaints climbed through the day.
The reports pointed to a broad outage affecting Slack users in the United States rather than a problem limited to one office, city or company. For people who rely on the service to move work forward in real time, the disruption cut off both new messages and the history they needed to answer them.
Downdetector's count gave the outage a clear footprint, with more than 2,000 users saying something was wrong. That kind of volume usually means the issue is affecting a large enough group to push the problem into public view quickly, even before any explanation is available from the service itself.
The immediate friction was simple and obvious: Slack was not letting users reach the places where work conversations live. When people cannot open channels or read older threads, they lose the thread of the day as well as the messages that explain what comes next.
For now, the central fact is that Slack is down for many users in the United States, and the reports suggest the problem was widespread enough to draw thousands of complaints. The next question is how long the outage lasts and when normal access returns for the people who depend on it to keep work moving.
