SAN FRANCISCO, May 14, 2026, 08:04 PDT
Slack confirmed Thursday it was looking into a service outage hitting file uploads, message edits, channel renames and creations, workflows, and third-party integrations. The disruption surfaced as users began flagging issues with the messaging platform at the start of the U.S. business day.
The timing is key here. For a lot of companies, Slack is more than a chat platform—teams rely on it for moving files, triggering workflows, and hooking up with external apps. When those functions falter, it can bog down customer support, stall software projects, and hold up internal sign-offs, even if messages are still getting through.
Slack’s dashboard flagged disruptions in messaging, files, apps, integrations, APIs, and workflows. APIs—short for application programming interfaces—connect Slack to external tools. Login, connectivity, notifications, huddles, search, and canvases, though, came up green with no issues.
The company reported the incident at 7:37 a.m. PDT and followed up with an update at 7:50 a.m. PDT, noting it was investigating sluggish load times, workflow-related errors, issues with editing messages, switching channels, adding reactions, uploading files, and trouble with third-party integrations. Some users might get errors posting images or using add-ins, according to the company.
User complaints piled up fast. According to GV Wire, which referenced Downdetector, over 2,000 people flagged issues with Slack by 7:35 a.m. PT—mainly trouble with sending or receiving messages. Downdetector’s numbers reflect incoming status reports and other indicators, so the tally suggests widespread trouble but doesn’t represent a verified count of affected customers.
According to Hindustan Times, people weren’t able to send messages, access chat channels, or even look up old threads. Over 2,000 users headed to Downdetector to flag the issue, the report said.
StatusGator, which also monitors outages, flagged Slack problems cropping up across multiple regions. Users logged complaints about error messages, connectivity hiccups, servers failing to respond, and trouble getting the app to load. The site separately noted it had spotted what looked like an outage affecting Slack’s screenshot attachment feature.
Salesforce finished buying Slack Technologies back in 2021, bringing the messaging platform under its umbrella. Now, the incident is putting Salesforce’s workplace software suite in the spotlight—a minor but noticeable test as collaboration tools remain essential to daily business.
The competition is limited, yet it’s there. If Slack’s chat or file tools falter, users have an easy route to Microsoft Teams or Google Chat—particularly inside companies locked into Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. Even Slack’s own pitch singles out both as main rivals for workplace messaging.
The extent of the issue isn’t clear yet. Slack still hadn’t shared a root cause, a timeline for resolution, or figures on how many customers are dealing with it. Sites that track user reports aren’t necessarily reliable; some problems get overlooked when users don’t bother to report, while in other cases, complaints might pile up in a brief surge, exaggerating the scale.
Slack calculates its uptime as an average across impacted users, explaining that outages typically don’t hit every team at once. For customers, that’s meant a mixed experience: certain core functions showed up as healthy, but anything tied to messaging—along with files and integrations—continued under an active incident.
