Slack’s outage and our dependency on “big tech”
A handful of companies currently hold the keys to our digital lives
On Monday, January 4, 2020 just as a number of companies were resuming from the holidays, we were all greeted with an outage on Slack. It started at first with delays in delivering messages which naturally, one assumed to be a problem with their ISP — leading to several internet modem reboots world wide (at least probably), as people continued to work from home.
A lot of the big tech companies are so good at what they do that most people will believe something else is wrong, other than an outage on the platform.
I investigated this further on Slack’s status page which confirmed the outage. This was in the middle of the day and mid-conversation with the rest of the team and naturally, panic set in. All kinds of questions crossed my mind such as how long the outage would last, what alternatives exist and how quickly we could mobilize the team to switch to an alternative platform. This has led me to realize just how dependent we are on “big tech”.
We are much more dependent on the platforms provided by the big tech companies than a lot of us would care to admit.
Naturally, the internet (especially twitter) was on fire with a lot of memes “roasting” Slack. A few of them were quite hilarious as seen below;
And this one got me in stitches 😅
It is safe to say that our digital lives revolve around a handful of companies — Google, Microsoft, Slack, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Zoom etc. and it is scary to think of the damage that could be done world-wide if more than one of these companies had a major outage lasting beyond a single day (civilization as we know it may just be over).
In Conclusion…
Here are two steps to stay ahead of the curve and prevent a complete collapse of operations at the work place in case of a Slack outage.
- Have a backup option — while Slack in some cases may be indispensable, there are a number of options, however, Microsoft Teams is at the top of the list. Since Teams comes bundled with an Office subscription, it may not hurt to have this as a backup.
- Do not get rid of e-mail — while Slack has been touted as the “e-mail killer” with the ease of sending messages and sharing files, it is prudent to have e-mail as a backup to keep communication going among team members. We were able to share emails while the outage lasted as against going completely dark.
