Hipsterverse horror as Slack takes Halloween hiatus

Slack has suffered an outage that plunged parts of the world into conversation or less-pretty messaging platforms for a couple of hours.

The horror manifested just as the United States West Coast darkened in preparation for Halloween, sending tens of thousands, including Reg operatives in San Francisco and Sydney, scrambling for alternative means of communication.

Vulture South's operatives resorted to a phone call for in-territory voice conversations – remember those? - and then remembered how to turn on Chat in G-Suite. The Vulture West crew professed surprise at messages appearing on their Android handsets, before also remembering that Google offers real-time chat, albeit without Slack's bling.

Tonight, @SlackHQ's Halloween costume will be pic.twitter.com/4CY3oP2Ol8

— The Register (@TheRegister) October 31, 2017

A great wailing soon pervaded the Internet, as many bemoaned the unavailability of Slack.

We're doing all we can to get this issue resolved. Again, we're so very sorry for the trouble. Thanks for being patient with us.

— Slack (@SlackHQ) November 1, 2017

The service also re-started sporadically: Reg operatives were able to re-connect at different times.

Slack has apologised, but at the time of writing has said nothing about the cause of the outage or how it plans to avoid repeats. Reg writers' Slack clients reported a web sockets error, but a major outage of this sort suggests a rather more complex cause.

If Slack details it, we'll let you know. ®