Slack experienced a possible service outage on Wednesday, with thousands of users reporting problems on Downdetector.com. By 3:54 p.m. PT, more than 2,800 users had submitted reports about issues with the workplace messaging platform, according to the outage-tracking site, which compiles user reports from multiple sources to identify service disruptions.
Most of the complaints centered on problems with sending and receiving messages, suggesting that Slack’s core communication functions were affected. At that time, Slack’s official status page did not show any issues, creating a mismatch between user reports and the company’s public service dashboard.
The number of reports continued to rise over the next several minutes. By 3:57 p.m. PT, more than 3,400 users had reported problems with the service. At 4:05 p.m. PT, that figure had climbed to more than 6,000 reports, indicating that the disruption was spreading or being experienced by a growing number of users.
Around that same time, Slack’s status page changed and began displaying the message: “Severe Latency Impacting All Slack Services.” The update signaled that the company had acknowledged a broader technical problem affecting the platform. An incident report on the tracker said Slack’s engineering team was investigating “severe latency impacting all Slack services” and would provide another update once more information was available.
The incident appears to have affected users across the service rather than being limited to a single feature, based on the company’s description of the problem. Severe latency can cause delays in message delivery, difficulty loading channels, and interruptions in normal app performance, all of which may prevent users from communicating effectively.
Downdetector’s figures are based on self-reported issues and do not always match official outage counts, but a sharp increase in reports often indicates a real service disruption. In this case, the rapid rise in complaints and Slack’s own status update suggested a significant platform-wide performance issue.
Slack is widely used by businesses, remote teams, and organizations for internal communication, so even short outages can affect daily operations and delay work. Users relying on the platform during the outage likely encountered trouble exchanging messages and accessing real-time conversations.
At the time of the latest update, Slack had acknowledged the issue and said its engineering team was investigating. No estimated time for a full restoration was included in the update.
