It’s not just you. Slack has been down for many people worldwide since late Thursday afternoon and some people are still struggling to access the messaging service via mobile app or even just slack.com on early Friday morning.
Slack says it’s a DNS issue and that your ISP may need to change its settings.
“We are aware of connectivity issues related to DNS that are impacting a small sub set of users. This issue was caused by our own change and not related to any third-party DNS software and services,” Slack said in a statement on Twitter around 4 p.m. ET on Thursday.
“In order to resolve this faster, your ISP (Internet Service Provider) will need to flush their DNS record for slack.com. Please reach out to your networking team to provide them with this information,“ the company continued.
When will the service be back? At first, Slack tweeted that it expected service to be restored for everyone within 12 hours. But that number was revised in a later tweet to within 24 hours. That means many people likely won’t see Slack restored until around 5 p.m. ET, which seems like it could be a problem for some people trying to get work done on a Friday.
By Thursday night Slack suggested switching to Google’s DNS servers as a possible solution and reloading Slack by holding down control and command while typing R.
“We’re seeing some signs of improvement, and reloading Slack (Ctrl/Command + R) may allow Slack to load again. The issue is not resolved for everyone, however, and we’ll be back again once we have another update to share,” Slack tweeted.
Many people in countries on the other side of the globe, like Sweden and Australia, have been without Slack during their entire workday, leading to complaints from workers trying to get something done. Ironically, those same people aren’t even able to load status.slack.com to check for updates and are tweeting at the company.
Slack did not respond to questions overnight but we’ll update this post when we hear back.