Slack outage: Degraded performance and connectivity issues

Curious what perf problems you’ve run into on the frontend (I.e. things electron would impact)? It doesn’t seem to me like they do anything complicated enough to take time.

Exactly. The kind of comment you're replying to is what I expect on a forum where gamers complain about companies not putting content artists on "fixing the servers", not Hacker News.

This. It’s not as if Slack is a tiny startup with three engineers. They’re a large company now of 2,700 or so, with nearly 1,000 working in engineering. At that scale, I am certain they can manage a UX redesign in parallel with any amount of back end engineering required.

I thought they already were, given what is happening.

Sorry, couldn't resist making the joke.

I'm forced to use Slack for work and I notice that there's a multi-second delay between my keyboard input and when the characters show up on the screen.

It’s as if they’re running a gigantic-scale, totally unique collaboration platform the likes of which the world has never seen, during a period in which a global pandemic has increased the use of the platform massively, leading to scaling challenges that anyone outside of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Dropbox, Slack and a mere handful of other giants would scarcely comprehend...

agree. but ideals dont always match up with reality.

Do you have suggestions for process or tooling that allows you to quickly / cheaply take the information or insights that arise from conversation and integrate them into a longer term store? And how to make that longer term location really useful?

To the degree that teams fall into the habit of just searching slack history for info, I think those are the two key factors:

- we remember bits of conversation, and who said something, or in which channel, can be a good way to rediscover the full details; note-taking and aggregating stuff into a knowledge base or docs repository can strip out that info making it harder to rediscover. (The obvious caveat here is that there can be sharp difference between re-finding a conversation you participated in e.g. in your team, vs finding information about a system you depend on from a conversation you didn't participate in.)

- the process of getting stuff shared in slack into a longer-term knowledge base can be slow and tedious, and may require someone to spend time deciding which pieces are potentially valuable, generalizing from the specific case discussed to a form that makes sense out of context, condensing what was said over many messages, arbitrating between views which are valuable but conflicting, etc.

I would like to see an NLP tool for summarizing threads and extracting the information which is most likely to be reusable.

We implemented a 90 day retention policy for all slack messages about a year ago. Everyone was pretty resistant to it at first, but it's been pretty great, honestly. It forces us to put things we'll want to remember in the handbook and encourages a more async culture. Personally I'd be happy with a 30 day retention policy!

I find searching chat history much more useful than what people used to do, which is throw anything that might be important into a wiki that never gets updated. At least in Slack you get some context around a piece of information rather than a hasty summary.

> I don't know why we don't switch to Teams.

If you'd used Teams, you'd know why. It is hilariously bad, gratuitously slow, ludicrously weird. I have periodically had to use Microsoft's team chat tools over the years, dating back to Yammer or perhaps even further, and for whatever reason it seems they just do not get chat.

Better question: why not just switch to Mattermost?

> We might have to re-do some bots,

You might not even be able to, Teams API is quite badly convoluted and limited. You simply won't be able to f.e. recreate Slackbot experience in group conversations(chats).

I have to use both heavily at work right now, one part of the company is on Slack, another on Teams, I'm involved with both. Despite its (many) issues, Slack is just so, so much nicer than Teams, the difference has an actual, substantial impact on communication. Teams feels like a disconnected and disorientating mess of ideas copied from other communication solutions in a huge hurry without understanding them fully and without even getting them to a point where they "click" and work as intended, and without thinking about how they fit into the big picture. Sole exception: Video calls are much better, when they work. The rest is a mess and makes communication a much more tedious effort than it has to be.

Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of Slack in the first place but Teams's UI just seems like an utter mess. I don't understand how I'm supposed to use it.

I'm sure I could figure it out if I spent 15 minutes, but it's a damn chat app. Why is this so hard?

And if your ticket system gets compromised?

I get it from the perspective of slack is a disorganized mess in terms of long term history, but moving sensitive data from one system to another with similar security doesnt seem like a win (or loss) for security to me.

We purge daily. We use it as an ephemeral messaging service, not as a wiki.

It's not that much about the UI even(which is terrible as a lot of other people here explained), but rather the disgustingly bad performance and costant issues. I use teams every day at work, it eats insane amounts of ram, it leaks memory during video conferences, it's practically unusable during a call, switching tabs from chat to teams takes anywhere from one to five seconds, push notifications simply do not work properly, so does motification badge - it also often takes seconds for teams to acknowledge that you've seen certain activity. Text input has such an insane latency that it's uncomfortable to write, often eating characters from the next message after pressing return if you start typing too quickly. And this is just a tip of the iceberg. Almost all of few hundreads of people in our org hate the app as well and we're almost purely a Microsoft shop. I liked Slack until it became incredibly bloated. But even now, it's still in another league when compared to the abysmal experience that Teams offer.

I've tried Teams. I dislike the UI however that is mostly personal preference and indeed it's not bad enough to make it unusable. If the UI was the only thing wrong with it I could still live with it.

The problem is that it's just so damn slow and unstable. It is an order of magnitude worse than Slack which is also an Electron app, so Electron alone isn't to blame here.

The notification system is a mess. They use their own notification system instead of integrating with the system one which is terrible because those notifications take up way more space than the default system ones and established UX behaviors (like dismissing them by swiping right on the trackpad) don't apply. There's also a bug where the notification is its own window which remains (in an invisible state) even when no notification is displayed (which means you can Cmd+Tab into it).

The tiny video window while you're on a call will bring up the main Teams UI when you try to minimize it. So if you're in a call with the participants in the main window and switch away from it, the little window will pop up in the bottom right corner of the screen. If you minimize that one, the main Teams window will come back into foreground and you now need to minimize it too.

The text editing experience is awful. It's wysiwyg-based with some minor Markdown-like formatting supported, but the problem is that copy/pasting most content from other apps will paste as "rich text" so not only is the formatting of that pasted text screwed up, but the screwed up formatting continues as you type beyond it. The button to copy a meeting invite link will copy HTML which means it'll work if pasted into a rich-text field (although the formatting will still be screwed up and differ from whatever was there before), but it will just spew out several long lines of HTML if you paste it into a plain text field like a code editor or another messenger. When you make a button called "copy meeting link", it should copy a plain-text link and that's it.

The slowness of it all is just the icing on the cake and makes dealing with those (relatively minor if in isolation) issues painful.

Teams is a pile of shit and its only objective is to win marketshare by appealing to bean-counters who will never seriously use it or people who've spent their entire life in a bullshit Microsoft environment and never tried real tools. I guess if your only experience of enterprise chat is Skype for Business (ex-Lync) then maybe it's better, but that's a pretty low bar and is definitely a trip back to the dark ages once you've used a real messenger like Slack or even the consumer-grade ones such as Discord, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, etc.

My experience using it for the past 3 months was so bad that it's now on my "stuff I don't work with" list and any potential client that insists on it gets an instant decline on my part.

Just a heads up, it looks like you're using single newlines and `-` for bullet points. If you don't want HN to eat your formatting just add another newline after each bulletpoint.

Sincerely, Clippy

And Zulip's UX is far better than Slack's. If you haven't tried it, I recommend it.

> There is apparently no way to get sound working in the Mac client, meaning that it might as well not exist.

FWIW, it works fine for a team in our company who regularly posts audio content for review. Many of us use macOS.

That's a pretty silly statement. Microsoft has not built a product where sounds flat out "doesn't work" on any Mac.

GSuite supports SAML, so it should work.

https://docs.mattermost.com/deployment/sso-saml.html

Not sure about Azure AD.

We use our own teams SSO/oAuth2 thing. A little homebrew solution to integrate MM, took about 2h to hack in.

FYI: Zulip (even self-hosted) offers Azure AD and many other AuthN integrations: https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/authentica....

I mean... no one is forced to use an Electron client to access IRC, so. That's kind of one of the main benefits of using an open, standard protocol like IRC.

> a bunch of volunteers and not a big silicon valley company with big operations team

This is probably the key, as they're happy to keep using simple, proven tools that worked for decades and will keep working.

They're not worried about "scaling", "microservices", creating problems so they can solve them and brag about it at conferences & on the (seemingly mandatory now) engineering blog, etc.

It's just a bunch of people running the thing in their spare time and their incentive is to make it so that it requires as little time investment as possible, instead of over-complicating the stack on purpose so they can fill up their resume with buzzwords.

Azure is second behind AWS and runs at a truly massive scale for all of Microsoft's services. It's not going to die from MS Teams usage which already has millions of people.

Perhaps if you actually used MS products, you would have a better idea of how they run.

Yes, I get that but wouldn’t launching new features be adding pressure during an outage which complicates the things? Capacity issue also could have been caused by a new feature probably acting greedy on the resources too.

If that's the cause of biweekly outages, shouldn't they be building or acquiring more capacity? I realize complexity plays a role in the rate at which capacity can be added to the system, but every two weeks is very frequent for that kind of problem. "Too many users" only counts when it's a surprise.

> standard client across multiple operating systems

In my case, it's suboptimal. There's a multi-second delay between when I type and when the characters show up on the screen. If I were able to use an OS specific client that didn't have these performance issues, then it would be a far better experience.