Slack is the dominant workplace messaging platform used by over 750,000 organizations worldwide for team communication, file sharing, and workflow automation. Acquired by Salesforce for $27.7 billion in 2021, Slack provides channels-based messaging, direct messages, huddles (audio/video calls), Slack Connect for cross-company collaboration, and an extensive app marketplace with over 2,600 integrations. Enterprise Grid deployments serve organizations with hundreds of thousands of employees across regulated industries.
Slack outages in 2025 have been notably caused by database maintenance operations that overloaded backend systems, triggering cascading connection failures across the platform. Message delivery infrastructure issues cause delayed or missing messages, while WebSocket connection drops result in the desktop and mobile apps showing stale channel content. Authentication service disruptions prevent users from signing in, and file upload backend failures block document sharing. Slack's real-time infrastructure is particularly sensitive to database connection pool exhaustion.
When Slack goes down, workplace communication stops for millions of teams simultaneously. Developers lose access to incident response channels, sales teams cannot coordinate deals, and customer support workflows that route through Slack channels halt entirely. Automated workflows built on Slack's API — including deployment notifications, alerting pipelines, and approval flows — fail silently. The productivity cost of a Slack outage is estimated at millions of dollars per hour across its user base.
Slack outages commonly result from database maintenance overloads, WebSocket connection infrastructure failures, or authentication service disruptions. In 2025, a database maintenance operation caused cascading failures across the platform. Check status.slack.com for official incident reports and follow @SlackStatus on Twitter for real-time updates.
Slack experiences minor incidents a few times per month, typically affecting specific features like file uploads or search rather than core messaging. Major outages that prevent all messaging are less frequent, occurring roughly 3-5 times per year. Most incidents resolve within 1-2 hours, though some database-related issues have lasted longer.
Switch to backup communication channels immediately. Most teams keep a secondary channel like Microsoft Teams, Discord, or even a group text thread for emergencies. For incident response, use PagerDuty or phone bridges. Document decisions made outside Slack so they can be recorded in channels once service resumes.
Yes, all Slack API integrations stop functioning during outages. Incoming webhooks return errors, bot messages fail to send, and interactive components become unresponsive. Messages sent via the API during an outage may be lost rather than queued. Implement retry logic with backoff in your integrations to handle transient failures gracefully.
Set up PinusX Uptime Monitor to check Slack's API availability and get Slack-alternative alerts via email within 60 seconds. This is critical because if Slack itself is your primary alerting channel, you need an independent notification path. PinusX sends both email and configurable webhook alerts.
Monitor Slack uptime with PinusX. Get instant alerts when services go down.