Is Slack Down? How to Check and What to Do

Messages are not sending. Channels are not loading. The little spinner keeps spinning. If Slack is acting up, your entire team's communication grinds to a halt. Before you restart the app for the third time, check whether the problem is Slack itself.

This guide covers how to check if Slack is down, what typically causes Slack outages, and what to do to keep your team productive while you wait for things to come back.

How to Check if Slack Is Down

Slack has a well-maintained public status page, which makes checking its status more straightforward than many other services.

Check the Official Slack Status Page

This is your first and most reliable stop.

The status page breaks down Slack's services into individual components. You can see whether the issue affects messaging, search, file uploads, the API, or specific integrations. During active incidents, Slack posts updates with timestamps and expected resolution times. They are generally good about updating this page during outages, often within minutes.

The page also shows a history of recent incidents, so you can see whether Slack has been having recurring problems.

Check Social Media

When Slack goes down, it becomes a trending topic fast. Millions of workers depend on Slack daily, so outages generate immediate chatter. Search Twitter/X for "slack down" or "slack outage" and look at posts from the last 30 minutes. If the results are full of people complaining about the same issues you are seeing, it is confirmed.

Slack's official Twitter account (@SlackStatus) posts updates during outages and is usually responsive. Following that account and turning on notifications is a simple way to stay informed.

Use Third-Party Outage Trackers

Downdetector tracks Slack and shows a real-time graph of user-reported issues. A sudden spike in reports is a reliable signal that Slack is having problems. Downdetector also shows what type of issues people are reporting (connection, messaging, notifications), which helps you understand the scope.

Try a Different Client

If you are using the Slack desktop app, try the web version at slack.com. If you are on the web version, try the mobile app. Sometimes a specific client has issues while others work fine. If none of them work, the problem is on Slack's servers.

Use Is That Down

Is That Down monitors Slack's status page automatically and sends alerts when incidents are reported. Instead of manually checking status.slack.com every time messages feel slow, you can get a notification the moment Slack reports a problem. For a complete guide to checking service status, see how to check if a service is down.

Common Causes of Slack Outages

Slack handles billions of messages and serves millions of concurrent users. Here is what typically goes wrong.

Infrastructure Failures

Slack runs on AWS, so problems with Amazon's cloud infrastructure can cascade into Slack outages. When AWS has issues in the regions Slack depends on, messaging, file uploads, and other features can degrade or fail entirely. The December 2021 AWS us-east-1 outage, for example, took Slack down along with dozens of other services.

Deployment and Code Issues

Slack ships updates constantly. Occasionally, a deployment introduces a bug that affects production systems. These issues can range from minor (emoji reactions not loading) to severe (messages not delivering at all). Slack's engineering team is typically fast at rolling back problematic deployments, but the initial impact can be sudden.

Database and Storage Problems

Slack stores an enormous volume of messages, files, and metadata. Database performance issues, storage failures, or replication problems can cause slow loading, missing messages, or search failures. These types of outages are often partial. Slack works, but it is slow or certain features do not respond.

Network Connectivity

Problems with Slack's network infrastructure or their CDN (content delivery network) can cause connection issues for users in specific regions. You might see the "Connecting..." message in the Slack client even though your internet connection is fine. These issues sometimes resolve on their own as network routes adjust.

Capacity During Peak Hours

Slack usage spikes at predictable times: Monday mornings, the start of the workday across major time zones, and during large company-wide meetings. While Slack is built to handle these surges, edge cases can occasionally cause degraded performance.

What to Do When Slack Is Down

A Slack outage does not have to stop your team from working. Here is how to keep things moving.

Switch to a Backup Communication Channel

If your team only communicates through Slack, an outage creates a total communication blackout. Have a backup plan ready.

Email. Not glamorous, but reliable and everyone has it. Send a quick note acknowledging Slack is down and directing communication elsewhere.

Microsoft Teams. If your organization has Microsoft 365 licenses, you likely have access to Teams already for messaging and video calls.

Text messages or phone calls. For urgent coordination, a quick group text or phone call is faster than setting up an alternative platform.

Zoom or Google Meet. If you need a meeting and Slack huddles are unavailable, jump to a video call.

Notify Your Team

If you are a team lead, send an email or text letting people know Slack is down and where to communicate in the meantime. Do not assume everyone has checked.

Focus on Deep Work

A Slack outage is a good time to focus on tasks that do not require real-time messaging. Write that document, finish that code review, or use comments in your task management tool (Jira, Asana, Linear) for project-specific communication.

Monitor the Status Page

Keep status.slack.com open in a tab. Slack posts regular updates during incidents, including estimated resolution times. Knowing whether the fix is minutes or hours away helps you decide whether to wait it out or fully switch to an alternative. For guidance on communicating about outages to your own users, see our outage communication guide.

Check Slack Integrations After Recovery

Once Slack comes back online, check that your integrations are working. Bots, automated notifications (from CI/CD pipelines, monitoring tools, support tickets), and webhooks can sometimes miss messages during an outage. If your team uses Slack integrations for critical alerts, verify that nothing was dropped.

How to Get Notified About Future Slack Outages

Waiting until messages stop sending is not a great detection strategy. Here is how to get ahead of the next one.

Subscribe to the Slack status RSS feed. Slack's status page offers an RSS/Atom feed you can subscribe to. Add it to your RSS reader or pipe it into a different messaging channel (email, a secondary chat tool) so you get updates even when Slack itself is unavailable.

Follow @SlackStatus on Twitter/X. Turn on notifications for this account. It is one of the fastest public channels for Slack outage information.

Use automated monitoring. Is That Down monitors Slack's status page and sends alerts through email, Slack (yes, ironic, but useful for minor incidents), or webhooks. Automated monitoring means you hear about the issue within minutes of Slack reporting it. For a complete alerting setup guide, see our vendor monitoring guide.

Set up a Slack status check in your incident process. If your team has an incident response process, add a step that checks vendor status pages when internal services degrade. Many "internal" issues turn out to be vendor outages. Our vendor outage response playbook includes vendor checks as a standard step.

Recent Notable Slack Outages

February 2022 Outage (4+ Hours)

On February 22, 2022, Slack experienced a major outage that lasted over four hours. Users worldwide could not send messages, load channels, or connect to the service. The incident started around 6:00 AM EST, catching teams across North America at the start of their workday. Slack posted updates throughout the morning on their status page. The root cause was related to infrastructure changes that caused unexpected load on their database systems.

June 2020 Outage

In June 2020, with remote work surging due to the pandemic, Slack went down during business hours. Users reported connection issues, messages failing to send, and channels not loading. The outage lasted a few hours and was attributed to increased load on Slack's infrastructure during the rapid shift to remote work. Having a documented backup communication plan means that the next Slack outage is an inconvenience rather than a crisis.

References

• Slack System Status - Official real-time status page for all Slack services.
• Slack Incident History - Archive of past Slack incidents and post-mortems.

Beyond vendor monitoring, consider pairing your alerting setup with uptime monitoring for your own services and SSL monitoring to catch certificate-related failures that can mimic vendor outages.