According to Mashable, Slack experienced major connectivity issues starting around 12:56 p.m. ET on Monday, November 10, with over 15,000 user reports flooding Downdetector within minutes. The popular corporate messaging platform acknowledged investigating a “new incident” on its status page as the outage began. At 1:26 p.m. ET, Slack confirmed some users were having trouble connecting or loading the service and promised an update within 30 minutes. Mashable’s own reporters were among those affected, unable to send messages during the peak of the outage. The timing couldn’t have been worse—hitting right as many teams were starting their workweek communication. By the time Mashable published their report, connectivity appeared to be returning for many users.
When Slack Goes Quiet
Here’s the thing about Slack outages—they’re not just inconvenient, they’re genuinely disruptive to modern work. When a platform that’s become the central nervous system of so many companies goes down, everything grinds to a halt. Teams can’t coordinate, decisions get delayed, and suddenly everyone remembers how much we’ve come to rely on these real-time communication tools.
And let’s talk about that timing. Monday afternoon? Basically the worst possible moment for productivity to take a hit. Companies were just getting into their weekly rhythms, planning meetings, and coordinating projects. The fact that Mashable’s own team was affected shows how widespread this was—even the people reporting on the outage couldn’t communicate about it through their normal channels.
The Bigger Picture
This incident raises some interesting questions about our dependence on centralized communication platforms. What happens when the digital water cooler suddenly runs dry? For enterprises that have built their entire workflow around Slack, an outage like this isn’t just annoying—it’s expensive. Lost productivity, missed deadlines, frustrated employees… the costs add up quickly.
It’s worth noting that both Mashable and Downdetector are owned by Ziff Davis, which adds an interesting layer to the reporting. But the core issue remains: when a service like Slack goes down, it exposes just how fragile our digital workplace infrastructure can be. The company’s status page updates followed the typical playbook—acknowledge, investigate, update—but for the thousands of users stuck waiting, that’s cold comfort when you’ve got work to do.
