Slack welcomes workers back with a service outage

New year, same telecommuting headaches.

Slack, a popular workplace communication platform, confirmed a service interruption for some users on Monday morning as many workers returned from the holiday break.

“Customers may experience issues connecting to Slack to loading channels at this time,” the company said. “Our team is on the case and we will keep you posted.”

At 10:30 am ET Monday, Slack’s status page showed that its messaging and connections functionality was being affected by a technical issue.

Slack and similar services emerged as even more essential tools for office workers to stay connected to their colleagues after the pandemic forced countless businesses to shift to remote work almost overnight.

About an hour after acknowledging the issue, Slack said it had “found where the issue is” and updated its status page to show an across-the-board outage.

As the incident dragged on, some users reported switching to alternatives, such as LinkedIn, the messaging app Discord or traditional communications channels like email.