Slack outage: Degraded performance and connectivity issues(status.slack.com)
status.slack.com
Slack outage: Degraded performance and connectivity issues
https://status.slack.com/2020-10/3e2253fb0e2f1b7c
115 comments
If I were slack I would immediately stop whatever nonsense re-design they are probably doing and redirect all resources to getting their system stable. Who cares about where my messages are being reorganized to when the damn chat doesn't even work?
I think the worst thing you could do in this situation is put the redesign people on the infrastructure team
This. It’s not as if Slack is a tiny startup with three engineers. They’re a large company now of 2,700 or so, with nearly 1,000 working in engineering. At that scale, I am certain they can manage a UX redesign in parallel with any amount of back end engineering required.
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I thought they already were, given what is happening.
Sorry, couldn't resist making the joke.
Sorry, couldn't resist making the joke.
Or just stop the nonsense redesigns in general. Moving things around every few months doesn't benefit anyone.
If the new design was clearly superior, fine, but then if it was clearly superior, they wouldn't do it again a few months down the road.
Maybe then Slack could also put resources into creating native apps. Electron supposedly streamlines development and allows teams to move quickly—but I'd rather they move slowly and make performant software.
If the new design was clearly superior, fine, but then if it was clearly superior, they wouldn't do it again a few months down the road.
Maybe then Slack could also put resources into creating native apps. Electron supposedly streamlines development and allows teams to move quickly—but I'd rather they move slowly and make performant software.
Curious what perf problems you’ve run into on the frontend (I.e. things electron would impact)? It doesn’t seem to me like they do anything complicated enough to take time.
I find the biggest perf issue is typing! seriously it actually lags behind my typing at an alarming delay sometimes, this is not being used on a slow or busy machine, there is something going on in slack front end that evaluates on every keystroke and sometimes it's really really fucking slow.
I spend most of my time on a computer with a 4790K and 32 GB of ram. There, admittedly, I don’t have any performance issues—but that’s because I have a ridiculous amount of overhead for something like Slack!
I sometimes use lower-end machines to test stuff, like a 2011 Macbook Air with 4GB of memory. There, I have all manner of problems—the fans spin up, and the whole Slack interface becomes extremely slow to respond. Simple things like changing channels and loading threads take seconds at a time.
These computers are inherently slower by modern standards, but there’s simply no reason Slack should require so many system resources!
I sometimes use lower-end machines to test stuff, like a 2011 Macbook Air with 4GB of memory. There, I have all manner of problems—the fans spin up, and the whole Slack interface becomes extremely slow to respond. Simple things like changing channels and loading threads take seconds at a time.
These computers are inherently slower by modern standards, but there’s simply no reason Slack should require so many system resources!
I understand where you’re coming from, but I also think that having a generally-reasonable-ish response time on decade old hardware that was considered lightweight-tier even at the time is not as awful as you make it seem.
I'd expect to have the same experience on most $300 Windows laptops, though. And even on better computers, what is that doing to electricity usage and multi-tasking performance?
AIM, ICQ and Yahoo Chats would work fine on that machine what features does Slack have that requires the additional resources?
I'm on a 2017 MacBook Pro right now with a 300Mb connection, and using the web interface takes multiple seconds to change channels, has a > 1 second delay in typing (resulting in missing keystrokes). My workstation isn't a particularly pleasant experience and it's _much_ beefier than this machine. My partner uses MS teams on a beater of a windows laptop with at most 4GB of ram and it performs substantially better.
I've made multiple support complaints to slack about their memory usage, there's been times where it's been using Gigabytes of memory on my workstation, and I've actually had to kill slack to compile on more than one occasion.
I've made multiple support complaints to slack about their memory usage, there's been times where it's been using Gigabytes of memory on my workstation, and I've actually had to kill slack to compile on more than one occasion.
> My partner uses MS teams on a beater of a windows laptop with at most 4GB of ram and it performs substantially better.
So not an electron issue, an engineering issue. That's I think at the root of all these "electron is bad" comments... poorly engineered code is slow. It will be slow if it's C++ or JS or Perl. But well engineered code is fast. And it can be fast in C++ or JS or Perl.
So not an electron issue, an engineering issue. That's I think at the root of all these "electron is bad" comments... poorly engineered code is slow. It will be slow if it's C++ or JS or Perl. But well engineered code is fast. And it can be fast in C++ or JS or Perl.
I don't disagree, but starting in electron is going to make your life much more difficult. Well engineered electron-based code may still be slower than shoddy C++
As an example, I've been playing with web frameworks recently. Asp.net running on dotnet core is roughly 10 times faster than node running express. While well engineered js might not get much slower, you'll never close that gap.
As an example, I've been playing with web frameworks recently. Asp.net running on dotnet core is roughly 10 times faster than node running express. While well engineered js might not get much slower, you'll never close that gap.
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FWIW I've had significantly better performance using the web interface, pretty much at all times. And as a bonus, you can open the same slack instances in multiple tabs and copy/paste/crosslink with relative ease.
It's still a hog of course, but it's broadly better.
It's still a hog of course, but it's broadly better.
I completely agree. While the UI was up to each individual user when we used IRC it was extremely stable. A lot of the Slack-isms are anti patterns and I can’t help but feel schadenfreude when they publicly have problems. They’ve caused enough for me.
I'd focus on improving performance. The web version is so unusably slow that I don't know how Slack is still taken seriously as a company
How is a multi-billion dollar company incapable of implementing a web chat in a competent way?
How is a multi-billion dollar company incapable of implementing a web chat in a competent way?
It’s as if they’re running a gigantic-scale, totally unique collaboration platform the likes of which the world has never seen, during a period in which a global pandemic has increased the use of the platform massively, leading to scaling challenges that anyone outside of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Dropbox, Slack and a mere handful of other giants would scarcely comprehend...
I'd give them that credit had Slack not always been a slothful sludge of molasses. For years.
Any app in which I can type faster than the characters appear has deeper issues than scaling.
Any app in which I can type faster than the characters appear has deeper issues than scaling.
> It’s as if they’re running a gigantic-scale, totally unique collaboration platform
No it’s a centralized SaaS IM/chat platform with a very slow web client and no native clients, because it’s not a standardised internet protocol surrounded by a healthy ecosystem.
No it’s a centralized SaaS IM/chat platform with a very slow web client and no native clients, because it’s not a standardised internet protocol surrounded by a healthy ecosystem.
And yet, a company that is about a quarter its size and entered the race 2 years later is able to beat them in features, performance and stability, even in these trying times.
All of that and they don't have Enterprise contracts with SLAs!
(I'm talking about Discord)
All of that and they don't have Enterprise contracts with SLAs!
(I'm talking about Discord)
Anecdotally, Discord is down and unresponsive far more than Slack ever has been. I would never run Discord as the main method of communication at a large company. It might be fine for when I game, but it's unreliable for anything serious.
Here's some data to back it up:
Slack's uptime is 99.95% from August to October[1]
Discord's uptime is 99.85% from August to October[2]
[1] https://status.slack.com/calendar [2] https://discordstatus.com/uptime?page=1
Here's some data to back it up:
Slack's uptime is 99.95% from August to October[1]
Discord's uptime is 99.85% from August to October[2]
[1] https://status.slack.com/calendar [2] https://discordstatus.com/uptime?page=1
Perhaps there is some regionality to the issues? I live in Brazil, and Slack is often somehow unavailable: images not loading, message delays, failure to load threads, and the built-in bot commands (not third parties) not responding. And mainly, voice calls having all sorts of connection issues imaginable.
In the last 3 months our team has had to (against company policy) fall back to Discord to be able to do our daily meetings about 6 or 7 times.
I wouldn't run Discord on a large company either, but not for stability's sake, but because their (free) screen sharing is possibly the worst if you want to share a desktop rather than a game (it is very much optimized for low delay, and the downscaling makes text unreadable).
In the last 3 months our team has had to (against company policy) fall back to Discord to be able to do our daily meetings about 6 or 7 times.
I wouldn't run Discord on a large company either, but not for stability's sake, but because their (free) screen sharing is possibly the worst if you want to share a desktop rather than a game (it is very much optimized for low delay, and the downscaling makes text unreadable).
I'm forced to use Slack for work and I notice that there's a multi-second delay between my keyboard input and when the characters show up on the screen.
I believe you, but I think you're hitting something completely unique to your setup and external to Slack. I've never seen antyhing like that, what are you running it on? Do you have ways to inspect to find where the bottleneck is?
> I believe you, but I think you're hitting something completely unique to your setup and external to Slack.
That's entirely possible, but this problem has persisted throughout multiple versions of Firefox and Fedora. For all I know, it could be due to the VPN connection, but even then, the VPN connection isn't that slow. Zoom video conferences still work reasonably well over it.
That's entirely possible, but this problem has persisted throughout multiple versions of Firefox and Fedora. For all I know, it could be due to the VPN connection, but even then, the VPN connection isn't that slow. Zoom video conferences still work reasonably well over it.
You must use a different Slack than I do, because I use nothing but the browser client and have had zero issues like this or the parent comment. Get up in arms about the outages, because that’s a bit more justified, but this feels a bit contrived?
it is getting harder and harder to convince my higher ups to not switch us on to Microsoft Teams (which they practically consider free vs the thousands we spend monthly just for the dev team).
its one saving grace for us is the amount of legacy comments and history of discussions we have built up over years across conversations that is useful for reference.
its one saving grace for us is the amount of legacy comments and history of discussions we have built up over years across conversations that is useful for reference.
Don't you guys find the MS Teams "chat" interface an absolute mess? When I tried it a few months ago it felt like another ridiculous UI that wanted to emulate mobile phone messages for some reason with giant chat bubbles, tons of wasted white space, emojiis, avatars, etc. Slack's "compact" mode definitely isn't perfect but it's better.
We as a tech world need to just revert back to the simple format most IRC clients use.
We as a tech world need to just revert back to the simple format most IRC clients use.
Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of Slack in the first place but Teams's UI just seems like an utter mess. I don't understand how I'm supposed to use it.
I'm sure I could figure it out if I spent 15 minutes, but it's a damn chat app. Why is this so hard?
I'm sure I could figure it out if I spent 15 minutes, but it's a damn chat app. Why is this so hard?
The thing is, their threaded interface kinda sucked, so they built another one ('chat') and tried to push the idea that 'Teams' (threaded) is for 'permanent' info, and 'Chat' is for the ethereal one. Except nobody really bothers with switching back and forth, most teams just choose one or the other and do everything in there. Bit of a mess.
I cannot fault them on the meeting functionality and sharepoint integrations though, they are excellent.
I cannot fault them on the meeting functionality and sharepoint integrations though, they are excellent.
As someone that uses Teams. It's not pleasant to use on a Mac.
My coworkers use Windows PCs and they all have a ton of fun problems with things as well.
I'm not so sure switching to Teams is a better move than Slack.
My coworkers use Windows PCs and they all have a ton of fun problems with things as well.
I'm not so sure switching to Teams is a better move than Slack.
Try it on a Linux system sometime then. The only saving grace is that the crap sputters "Skype" everywhere, so you get to imagine what a sad miserable existence it must be for the people maintaining that obviously inherited, hastily cloned monstrosity.
MSFT just pushed a UI update to Outlook on Mac that is actually really nice. I'm hoping that maybe they've finally got their UX together and Teams will improve. Pretty sure my company will be axing Slack in favor of Teams in the next year or two. Maybe by then it will have a reasonably good UX.
That smacks of a checkbox-driven mentality to software. Similar features don't have the same result. Implementation matters a lot
Flip it around and ask, what is the benefit of more effective communication worth to your company? You're already paying at least $10k a month for each person on your team. Making each person just 1% more efficient should be worth $100 a month.
It's not unbelievable that a communcation app would make that happen. Reaching out to a coworker saves a couple of hours of digging around. A high quality FYI channel means someone can read a proposal and spot a critical issue.
Slack is far from perfect, but choosing Teams instead to save a little cash seems like madness.
Flip it around and ask, what is the benefit of more effective communication worth to your company? You're already paying at least $10k a month for each person on your team. Making each person just 1% more efficient should be worth $100 a month.
It's not unbelievable that a communcation app would make that happen. Reaching out to a coworker saves a couple of hours of digging around. A high quality FYI channel means someone can read a proposal and spot a critical issue.
Slack is far from perfect, but choosing Teams instead to save a little cash seems like madness.
I find this kind of usage frightening. I honestly think that a message history of longer than a week encourages poor organisation to such a degree that daily operation is significantly and silently hampered.
Do you have suggestions for process or tooling that allows you to quickly / cheaply take the information or insights that arise from conversation and integrate them into a longer term store? And how to make that longer term location really useful?
To the degree that teams fall into the habit of just searching slack history for info, I think those are the two key factors:
- we remember bits of conversation, and who said something, or in which channel, can be a good way to rediscover the full details; note-taking and aggregating stuff into a knowledge base or docs repository can strip out that info making it harder to rediscover. (The obvious caveat here is that there can be sharp difference between re-finding a conversation you participated in e.g. in your team, vs finding information about a system you depend on from a conversation you didn't participate in.)
- the process of getting stuff shared in slack into a longer-term knowledge base can be slow and tedious, and may require someone to spend time deciding which pieces are potentially valuable, generalizing from the specific case discussed to a form that makes sense out of context, condensing what was said over many messages, arbitrating between views which are valuable but conflicting, etc.
I would like to see an NLP tool for summarizing threads and extracting the information which is most likely to be reusable.
To the degree that teams fall into the habit of just searching slack history for info, I think those are the two key factors:
- we remember bits of conversation, and who said something, or in which channel, can be a good way to rediscover the full details; note-taking and aggregating stuff into a knowledge base or docs repository can strip out that info making it harder to rediscover. (The obvious caveat here is that there can be sharp difference between re-finding a conversation you participated in e.g. in your team, vs finding information about a system you depend on from a conversation you didn't participate in.)
- the process of getting stuff shared in slack into a longer-term knowledge base can be slow and tedious, and may require someone to spend time deciding which pieces are potentially valuable, generalizing from the specific case discussed to a form that makes sense out of context, condensing what was said over many messages, arbitrating between views which are valuable but conflicting, etc.
I would like to see an NLP tool for summarizing threads and extracting the information which is most likely to be reusable.
I find searching chat history much more useful than what people used to do, which is throw anything that might be important into a wiki that never gets updated. At least in Slack you get some context around a piece of information rather than a hasty summary.
We implemented a 90 day retention policy for all slack messages about a year ago. Everyone was pretty resistant to it at first, but it's been pretty great, honestly. It forces us to put things we'll want to remember in the handbook and encourages a more async culture. Personally I'd be happy with a 30 day retention policy!
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agree. but ideals dont always match up with reality.
The "amount of legacy comments and history" is the single most useful thing about Slack, imo. Teams in comparison was an absolute nightmare to try to find references to old conversations in, it felt like throwing away information into a bog, never to be retrieved ever again. Slack's archival search was the biggest reason I was able to onboard to a new team as quickly as I did, especially given WFH, since it removed the need to ask an actual person about so many of my questions.
Please dont. Microsoft teams is a mess of chat boxes. You'll regret it.
Just don't.
Just don't.
Keeping comments is a bad practice: If your slack ever gets compromised you’ll wish you deleted everything. We purge every 6 mo. Keep updates in tickets.
And if your ticket system gets compromised?
I get it from the perspective of slack is a disorganized mess in terms of long term history, but moving sensitive data from one system to another with similar security doesnt seem like a win (or loss) for security to me.
I get it from the perspective of slack is a disorganized mess in terms of long term history, but moving sensitive data from one system to another with similar security doesnt seem like a win (or loss) for security to me.
When I update a ticket I write it expecting someone else to read it. It’s well written and thought out. When I chat I say whatever is reasonable, it’s low effort.
Note I didn’t call out sensitive information specifically. Just that you wished you deleted messages. You shouldn’t store secrets in a ticket system either.
Note I didn’t call out sensitive information specifically. Just that you wished you deleted messages. You shouldn’t store secrets in a ticket system either.
Still don't quite follow your comment. Is "keeping updates in tickets" separate from the comment on deleting messages?
I worked at a place that used Slack pings in lieu of tickets. The history was kept for ~7 years. This is a huge liability IMO. A off comment by the CEO could be misunderstood by an attacker or the public if it was to be leaked.
I’m saying it’s ok for quick cursory discussions but those who retain Slack messages for tribal knowledge tend to have larger organizational issues. This knowledge should be in tickets where it’s expected to write well written responses with the intention of documenting knowledge.
I’m saying it’s ok for quick cursory discussions but those who retain Slack messages for tribal knowledge tend to have larger organizational issues. This knowledge should be in tickets where it’s expected to write well written responses with the intention of documenting knowledge.
We purge daily. We use it as an ephemeral messaging service, not as a wiki.
I don't know why we don't switch to Teams. I enjoy slack and the history of comments is useful, but like you said Teams is already included in things we're paying for so why not use it. We might have to re-do some bots, but if it saves the company money and works basically the same it makes sense to switch.
> I don't know why we don't switch to Teams.
If you'd used Teams, you'd know why. It is hilariously bad, gratuitously slow, ludicrously weird. I have periodically had to use Microsoft's team chat tools over the years, dating back to Yammer or perhaps even further, and for whatever reason it seems they just do not get chat.
Better question: why not just switch to Mattermost?
If you'd used Teams, you'd know why. It is hilariously bad, gratuitously slow, ludicrously weird. I have periodically had to use Microsoft's team chat tools over the years, dating back to Yammer or perhaps even further, and for whatever reason it seems they just do not get chat.
Better question: why not just switch to Mattermost?
> If you'd used Teams, you'd know why. It is hilariously bad, gratuitously slow, ludicrously weird.
I use both all day, every day. I don't find Teams to be any worse, slower, or weirder than Slack.
Teams also does a lot that Slack can't do. As one small examples, it seems amazing that I can't add tabs to a Slack channel like I can in Teams.
I use both all day, every day. I don't find Teams to be any worse, slower, or weirder than Slack.
Teams also does a lot that Slack can't do. As one small examples, it seems amazing that I can't add tabs to a Slack channel like I can in Teams.
> We might have to re-do some bots,
You might not even be able to, Teams API is quite badly convoluted and limited. You simply won't be able to f.e. recreate Slackbot experience in group conversations(chats).
You might not even be able to, Teams API is quite badly convoluted and limited. You simply won't be able to f.e. recreate Slackbot experience in group conversations(chats).
I have to use both heavily at work right now, one part of the company is on Slack, another on Teams, I'm involved with both. Despite its (many) issues, Slack is just so, so much nicer than Teams, the difference has an actual, substantial impact on communication. Teams feels like a disconnected and disorientating mess of ideas copied from other communication solutions in a huge hurry without understanding them fully and without even getting them to a point where they "click" and work as intended, and without thinking about how they fit into the big picture. Sole exception: Video calls are much better, when they work. The rest is a mess and makes communication a much more tedious effort than it has to be.
Teams is awful compared to Slack, Slack's UX and feature set blow it out of the water.
And Zulip's UX is far better than Slack's. If you haven't tried it, I recommend it.
Try Teams, it's not as bad as most comments here seem to indicate. I understand if you're used to the slack UI (as most users of Hackers News are), it seems like a step backwards, but that's only because you're looking for a 1:1 replacement for slack.
Having taking the route of going from Slack to Teams, where Teams is better at, IMHO, is the following:
- Within channels, all conversations are, by default, organized into threads. This gives you to the feeling that there are lots of chat boxes, but once we spend a few days with it, our team started noticing that our conversations have become more structured. However starting a new "thread" off the main channel discussion in slack takes significant conscious effort and its very easy for multiple conversations to get interleaved and become a mess. - Integrated video/audio calls, along with call built-in note taking, makes for a very seamless jump from text to voice/video. With Slack, we needed to maintain separate Zoom account, as it's built-in voice/video chat was pretty bad. - If your IT has already sold its soul to Microsoft Enterprise infra, Teams just fits in really really well, with its Active Directory/Azure AD/O365 integrations. It's no wonder that Teams is doing well in the Enterprise space. We still use GSuite for our emails, but given how less our team emails these days, if I were given an option to start from scratch, I'd probably choose to host our email on O365 outlook (even though I feel Gmail's UI is superior).
Of course, nothing is without its problems - you're dealing with Microsoft products, so except to hassle around a little bit with licensing, bad markdown abilities and a few other quirks. I've seen complaints of the client being really slow at times, but my team hasn't seen this issue in the recent past, since we switched in, except once or twice, where a restart of the client solves it.
One part of our team (~12 people) used Hangouts Chat for a few months, which has been around for more than a few years, and every six months. It sucks. They just released a new update to how their buttons looked every 6 months. I don't know why Google even bothers putting up this product.
The criticism for Teams is disproportionate in Hacker News, I don't understand why. I encourage you to try it out for a few days with a select group of people and make up your own mind.
Having taking the route of going from Slack to Teams, where Teams is better at, IMHO, is the following:
- Within channels, all conversations are, by default, organized into threads. This gives you to the feeling that there are lots of chat boxes, but once we spend a few days with it, our team started noticing that our conversations have become more structured. However starting a new "thread" off the main channel discussion in slack takes significant conscious effort and its very easy for multiple conversations to get interleaved and become a mess. - Integrated video/audio calls, along with call built-in note taking, makes for a very seamless jump from text to voice/video. With Slack, we needed to maintain separate Zoom account, as it's built-in voice/video chat was pretty bad. - If your IT has already sold its soul to Microsoft Enterprise infra, Teams just fits in really really well, with its Active Directory/Azure AD/O365 integrations. It's no wonder that Teams is doing well in the Enterprise space. We still use GSuite for our emails, but given how less our team emails these days, if I were given an option to start from scratch, I'd probably choose to host our email on O365 outlook (even though I feel Gmail's UI is superior).
Of course, nothing is without its problems - you're dealing with Microsoft products, so except to hassle around a little bit with licensing, bad markdown abilities and a few other quirks. I've seen complaints of the client being really slow at times, but my team hasn't seen this issue in the recent past, since we switched in, except once or twice, where a restart of the client solves it.
One part of our team (~12 people) used Hangouts Chat for a few months, which has been around for more than a few years, and every six months. It sucks. They just released a new update to how their buttons looked every 6 months. I don't know why Google even bothers putting up this product.
The criticism for Teams is disproportionate in Hacker News, I don't understand why. I encourage you to try it out for a few days with a select group of people and make up your own mind.
It's not that much about the UI even(which is terrible as a lot of other people here explained), but rather the disgustingly bad performance and costant issues. I use teams every day at work, it eats insane amounts of ram, it leaks memory during video conferences, it's practically unusable during a call, switching tabs from chat to teams takes anywhere from one to five seconds, push notifications simply do not work properly, so does motification badge - it also often takes seconds for teams to acknowledge that you've seen certain activity. Text input has such an insane latency that it's uncomfortable to write, often eating characters from the next message after pressing return if you start typing too quickly. And this is just a tip of the iceberg. Almost all of few hundreads of people in our org hate the app as well and we're almost purely a Microsoft shop. I liked Slack until it became incredibly bloated. But even now, it's still in another league when compared to the abysmal experience that Teams offer.
I've tried Teams. I dislike the UI however that is mostly personal preference and indeed it's not bad enough to make it unusable. If the UI was the only thing wrong with it I could still live with it.
The problem is that it's just so damn slow and unstable. It is an order of magnitude worse than Slack which is also an Electron app, so Electron alone isn't to blame here.
The notification system is a mess. They use their own notification system instead of integrating with the system one which is terrible because those notifications take up way more space than the default system ones and established UX behaviors (like dismissing them by swiping right on the trackpad) don't apply. There's also a bug where the notification is its own window which remains (in an invisible state) even when no notification is displayed (which means you can Cmd+Tab into it).
The tiny video window while you're on a call will bring up the main Teams UI when you try to minimize it. So if you're in a call with the participants in the main window and switch away from it, the little window will pop up in the bottom right corner of the screen. If you minimize that one, the main Teams window will come back into foreground and you now need to minimize it too.
The text editing experience is awful. It's wysiwyg-based with some minor Markdown-like formatting supported, but the problem is that copy/pasting most content from other apps will paste as "rich text" so not only is the formatting of that pasted text screwed up, but the screwed up formatting continues as you type beyond it. The button to copy a meeting invite link will copy HTML which means it'll work if pasted into a rich-text field (although the formatting will still be screwed up and differ from whatever was there before), but it will just spew out several long lines of HTML if you paste it into a plain text field like a code editor or another messenger. When you make a button called "copy meeting link", it should copy a plain-text link and that's it.
The slowness of it all is just the icing on the cake and makes dealing with those (relatively minor if in isolation) issues painful.
Teams is a pile of shit and its only objective is to win marketshare by appealing to bean-counters who will never seriously use it or people who've spent their entire life in a bullshit Microsoft environment and never tried real tools. I guess if your only experience of enterprise chat is Skype for Business (ex-Lync) then maybe it's better, but that's a pretty low bar and is definitely a trip back to the dark ages once you've used a real messenger like Slack or even the consumer-grade ones such as Discord, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, etc.
My experience using it for the past 3 months was so bad that it's now on my "stuff I don't work with" list and any potential client that insists on it gets an instant decline on my part.
The problem is that it's just so damn slow and unstable. It is an order of magnitude worse than Slack which is also an Electron app, so Electron alone isn't to blame here.
The notification system is a mess. They use their own notification system instead of integrating with the system one which is terrible because those notifications take up way more space than the default system ones and established UX behaviors (like dismissing them by swiping right on the trackpad) don't apply. There's also a bug where the notification is its own window which remains (in an invisible state) even when no notification is displayed (which means you can Cmd+Tab into it).
The tiny video window while you're on a call will bring up the main Teams UI when you try to minimize it. So if you're in a call with the participants in the main window and switch away from it, the little window will pop up in the bottom right corner of the screen. If you minimize that one, the main Teams window will come back into foreground and you now need to minimize it too.
The text editing experience is awful. It's wysiwyg-based with some minor Markdown-like formatting supported, but the problem is that copy/pasting most content from other apps will paste as "rich text" so not only is the formatting of that pasted text screwed up, but the screwed up formatting continues as you type beyond it. The button to copy a meeting invite link will copy HTML which means it'll work if pasted into a rich-text field (although the formatting will still be screwed up and differ from whatever was there before), but it will just spew out several long lines of HTML if you paste it into a plain text field like a code editor or another messenger. When you make a button called "copy meeting link", it should copy a plain-text link and that's it.
The slowness of it all is just the icing on the cake and makes dealing with those (relatively minor if in isolation) issues painful.
Teams is a pile of shit and its only objective is to win marketshare by appealing to bean-counters who will never seriously use it or people who've spent their entire life in a bullshit Microsoft environment and never tried real tools. I guess if your only experience of enterprise chat is Skype for Business (ex-Lync) then maybe it's better, but that's a pretty low bar and is definitely a trip back to the dark ages once you've used a real messenger like Slack or even the consumer-grade ones such as Discord, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, etc.
My experience using it for the past 3 months was so bad that it's now on my "stuff I don't work with" list and any potential client that insists on it gets an instant decline on my part.
Just a heads up, it looks like you're using single newlines and `-` for bullet points. If you don't want HN to eat your formatting just add another newline after each bulletpoint.
Sincerely, Clippy
Sincerely, Clippy
I don't understand the fascination with Microsoft Teams, it doesn't work.
Sound simply doesn't work in the app, full stop. You need to use the web version, in Chrome, because nothing else works... Well Edge maybe, who knows. There is apparently no way to get sound working in the Mac client, meaning that it might as well not exist.
Sound simply doesn't work in the app, full stop. You need to use the web version, in Chrome, because nothing else works... Well Edge maybe, who knows. There is apparently no way to get sound working in the Mac client, meaning that it might as well not exist.
> There is apparently no way to get sound working in the Mac client, meaning that it might as well not exist.
FWIW, it works fine for a team in our company who regularly posts audio content for review. Many of us use macOS.
FWIW, it works fine for a team in our company who regularly posts audio content for review. Many of us use macOS.
That's a pretty silly statement. Microsoft has not built a product where sounds flat out "doesn't work" on any Mac.
No one at my company has managed to have a functional video conference using the Mac client, and I talked to people at two major software development companies in Denmark, they have the same problem. The web client works. It’s not as good or easy as Google Meet, or what ever it’s called, but it works. The Mac client does NOT work and have not worked for at least six month.
> The Mac client does NOT work and have not worked for at least six month.
That's odd. We have lots of macOS-using employees (myself included) doing this every day.
That's odd. We have lots of macOS-using employees (myself included) doing this every day.
My teams self hosted mattermost still running fine. $5/mo well spent :) very happy we switched from paid-slack.
Does it have SSO with Azure AD/Gsuite? that would make it a good deal.
FYI: Zulip (even self-hosted) offers Azure AD and many other AuthN integrations: https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/authentica....
We use our own teams SSO/oAuth2 thing. A little homebrew solution to integrate MM, took about 2h to hack in.
GSuite supports SAML, so it should work.
https://docs.mattermost.com/deployment/sso-saml.html
Not sure about Azure AD.
https://docs.mattermost.com/deployment/sso-saml.html
Not sure about Azure AD.
"Degraded performance and connectivity issues" also sums up the effect of slack outages on our team
So, does this increase or decrease productivity across the board?
Define productivity. Working really hard on the wrong thing can be seen as productive but is in fact negative productivity. Slack and so on aren't about increasing individual productivity but longer term company productivity.
HugOps to them, this is quite the string of issues over the last few weeks.
IRC still works fine 30 years later, in case you were wondering.
When even was the last major freenode outage that lasted more than a couple minutes? Its especially noteworthy since freenode is basically a bunch of volunteers and not a big silicon valley company with big operations team.
> a bunch of volunteers and not a big silicon valley company with big operations team
This is probably the key, as they're happy to keep using simple, proven tools that worked for decades and will keep working.
They're not worried about "scaling", "microservices", creating problems so they can solve them and brag about it at conferences & on the (seemingly mandatory now) engineering blog, etc.
It's just a bunch of people running the thing in their spare time and their incentive is to make it so that it requires as little time investment as possible, instead of over-complicating the stack on purpose so they can fill up their resume with buzzwords.
This is probably the key, as they're happy to keep using simple, proven tools that worked for decades and will keep working.
They're not worried about "scaling", "microservices", creating problems so they can solve them and brag about it at conferences & on the (seemingly mandatory now) engineering blog, etc.
It's just a bunch of people running the thing in their spare time and their incentive is to make it so that it requires as little time investment as possible, instead of over-complicating the stack on purpose so they can fill up their resume with buzzwords.
Though I wonder if it would perform as bad as Slack if people were forced to use an Electron client in a web browser.
I mean... no one is forced to use an Electron client to access IRC, so. That's kind of one of the main benefits of using an open, standard protocol like IRC.
Slack used to have that benefit when they had their IRC and XMPP gateways online. I know there are clients out there that leverage the API to do the same thing, but it's essentially re-inventing the wheel covered by numerous existing IRC and XMPP clients.
wtf is irc
I usually experience improved performance during any Slack outage.
Oh, thank goodness.
Whenever I have difficulty using a piece of corporate infrastructure, the Gary Owens voice from Space Quest IV says in my head: "Oh, by the way, you're about to be fired." So the first thing I do is check to see if it's just me. If others, or in this case the whole freakin' world, experience the same outage issues I breathe a bit easier.
Whenever I have difficulty using a piece of corporate infrastructure, the Gary Owens voice from Space Quest IV says in my head: "Oh, by the way, you're about to be fired." So the first thing I do is check to see if it's just me. If others, or in this case the whole freakin' world, experience the same outage issues I breathe a bit easier.
> We are currently investigating, and apologise for the inconvenience caused.
I just want to say, this is much better than when people say "we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused."
It's really inconvenient, thanks for just acknowledging that up front.
I just want to say, this is much better than when people say "we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused."
It's really inconvenient, thanks for just acknowledging that up front.
If they don’t get it together giant company that I work for who had thus far let engineers/product use slack is going to force us into ms teams. I hope they get it together. They are just handing it to Microsoft at this point with unforced errors.
Thing is as soon as people switch to MSTeams and their (running on Azure) infrastructure for MSTeams is going to shit itself and die. The scale of operations between MS and Slack is few leagues inbetween each other.
I fear the day Im forced to start using MS products. Nothing but troubles with them - from ms servers, to cloud, to apps and “windows phone OS”.
Everything low quality and buggy.
I fear the day Im forced to start using MS products. Nothing but troubles with them - from ms servers, to cloud, to apps and “windows phone OS”.
Everything low quality and buggy.
Azure is second behind AWS and runs at a truly massive scale for all of Microsoft's services. It's not going to die from MS Teams usage which already has millions of people.
Perhaps if you actually used MS products, you would have a better idea of how they run.
Perhaps if you actually used MS products, you would have a better idea of how they run.
Azure may have significant market share but I don't know anyone who likes it or recommends it. I find it painful to use. I was rubbed the wrong way when I was forced to install a Windows VM on my Mac to run some Powershell commands b/c Microsoft didn't expose some kind of functionality in the console. Like, seriously? I couldn't just call the API with curl?
You probably can since the portal just uses the same APIs. Azure also has a CLI: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/
All 3 major clouds have their own idiosyncrasies. They're all good and bad at different things and I don't find any single one to be definitely better or worse than the rest.
All 3 major clouds have their own idiosyncrasies. They're all good and bad at different things and I don't find any single one to be definitely better or worse than the rest.
I’m not intelligent in the huge scale distributed systems stuff but if there are outages every couple of weeks, why would you push code to production several times each day?
I honestly don’t know what’s in Slack which requires pushing code to production several times every day. I completely understand having that capability is required for any serious engineering org but what kind of churn is that? Maybe someone knowledgeable can help me understand.
I honestly don’t know what’s in Slack which requires pushing code to production several times every day. I completely understand having that capability is required for any serious engineering org but what kind of churn is that? Maybe someone knowledgeable can help me understand.
Outages are not always caused by bugs you deploy to production. They can be due to capacity issues with too many users at once using the platform.
If that's the cause of biweekly outages, shouldn't they be building or acquiring more capacity? I realize complexity plays a role in the rate at which capacity can be added to the system, but every two weeks is very frequent for that kind of problem. "Too many users" only counts when it's a surprise.
Yes, I get that but wouldn’t launching new features be adding pressure during an outage which complicates the things? Capacity issue also could have been caused by a new feature probably acting greedy on the resources too.
While true in principle... those kinds of causes tend to have pretty clear cause-effect (or at least strong time correlations), and get rolled back. New call patterns / major load changes are generally pretty obvious and at least coarsely traceable if you have monitoring anywhere.
Seems like it's becoming an issue on a weekly basis. Stability is essential - if that is not prioritized it's going downhill in the long term.
I don’t see how you can state that stability is not a priority. Slack has had a few very bad days, but recall that this is normal with all such rapidly scaling, massive services.
Our slackbot was delivering updates 30+ mins after they were supposed to arrive
Again?
Good riddance. Better embrace a good ticketing system and go full async. Have an old fashioned call for high-bandwith in-sync issues or just for fun.
I don't know, I'm quite fond of IRC + automatic picture loading + OAuth Support out of the box + standard client across multiple operating systems + video chat + voice calls + common bot framework + common webhook framework with multiple company's buy-in
edit: to be clear, this is what Slack brings to the table.
edit: to be clear, this is what Slack brings to the table.
> standard client across multiple operating systems
In my case, it's suboptimal. There's a multi-second delay between when I type and when the characters show up on the screen. If I were able to use an OS specific client that didn't have these performance issues, then it would be a far better experience.
In my case, it's suboptimal. There's a multi-second delay between when I type and when the characters show up on the screen. If I were able to use an OS specific client that didn't have these performance issues, then it would be a far better experience.
I wonder if you've only tried using the web client. I see the same terrible delays in the web client, even on a monster PC where it seems there should be no excuse for slowness.
However, it seems better in their "native" electron client. Still no excuse, performance is terrible in the web client, in my experience, and I'd prefer to use that if I could.
However, it seems better in their "native" electron client. Still no excuse, performance is terrible in the web client, in my experience, and I'd prefer to use that if I could.
Just filmed myself pressing a key on slack (linux client). Framerate was 30fps.
5 frames / 160ms for the key to appear at the start of a chat line.
3 frames / 100ms for the next key to appear
Firefox in a plain text box takes 2 frames / 65ms
What OS you using? I haven't noticed an issue on the rare occasions I use my (7 year old) mac
5 frames / 160ms for the key to appear at the start of a chat line.
3 frames / 100ms for the next key to appear
Firefox in a plain text box takes 2 frames / 65ms
What OS you using? I haven't noticed an issue on the rare occasions I use my (7 year old) mac
I'm using Firefox on Fedora 31, but this seems to be an issue across multiple OS versions. The machine is a Dell Ultrabook with a Core i7 processor and 16 GB of RAM.
filmed at 240fps so 4.17ms per frame. Desktop from 2014. Intel CPU and GPU. 60fps 4k monitor, so 16.67ms per frame.
Slack desktop application best case: 325ms with spell check disabled.
Telegram desktop application worst case: 25ms with spell check enabled
I am sure I wasn't precise in my key press detection. Nonetheless it's still a really sad difference.
Slack desktop application best case: 325ms with spell check disabled.
Telegram desktop application worst case: 25ms with spell check enabled
I am sure I wasn't precise in my key press detection. Nonetheless it's still a really sad difference.
It's odd. What desktop environment are you using? Mine's from 2014 or 2015 with xfce. spell check is enabled from the looks of it, but only comes in when I press "space".
Try turning off spell checking. Even then, there is a noticable lag. But better than nothing.