Slack says it is shutting down its SlackStatus account on X, which alerted users of incidents and outages on the platform, Thursday night. The office messaging platform will move its incident status alerts to its website.
“We made the decision to retire the @SlackStatus account in order to consolidate our communications around incidents and focus resources on those most widely used by our customers,” said VP of customer experience at Slack Kevin Albers in an emailed statement.
Slack has experienced its share of outages and issues throughout its history. More than 10,000 users reported outages back in August, and there were 4,000 outages back in July. The company typically resolves these issues in a couple of hours for its 20 million active users. The X account was also a useful way for users to get in contact with the company and receive information.
Slack is one of many companies to pull back from X this year. American Express and Air France both pulled their customer service accounts off the platform this year. This class of incident report accounts was especially useful with the TweetDeck feature, once a free service that moved behind a paywall this year, now only available through X Pro for $US84 a year. Elon Musk’s social media company is currently testing out a $US1 annual fee for new users in New Zealand and the Philippines to access the platform.
Slack, however, might be trying to make its flubs less public by moving its incidents off social media and instead to a corner of its website. Slack incidents would typically become trending topics on X when they happened, partially because of a flock of users tweeting at SlackStatus because their messages won’t send or they couldn’t log onto the platform.