Explained | What does the unavailability of Twitter’s Slack say about the company’s health?

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The story so far: While companies cannot function safely without enterprise-grade communication tools, a vast Big Tech company like Twitter whose offices and employees are scattered across the world are extra dependent on their messaging services and resource hubs. However, Slack, the communication solution used by Twitter employees has gone down, triggering chaos across departments.

What happened to Twitter’s Slack?

In the penultimate week of February, Twitter’s staff was reportedly told that their company’s Slack instance was under “routine maintenance” and couldn’t be used, according to tech outlet The Platformer. However, a Slack employee who spoke to the outlet denied this allegation. Slack was down on February 22 and 23, prompting some employees to even take time off as they couldn’t complete their deliverables.

There were two major theories that could explain why Slack was down. First, some employees believed that Slack was inaccessible because it hadn’t been paid for.

Twitter offices in Singapore, the U. K., and even the U.S. have faced alleged rent issues under CEO Elon Musk’s leadership, so it is possible that Slack also went down due to non-payment of its outstanding bills.

Second, The Platformer reported that Slack may have been deliberately turned off to see if Twitter’s remaining employees could handle daily operations using less expensive tools. The outlet reported that Tesla uses a solution called Mattermost, as well as Microsoft Outlook and Teams.

What could this mean for Twitter?

Slack is an enterprise-grade communication tool that allows employees all over the world to instantly communicate with others, take part in group chats, share media, create channels to streamline projects or teams, facilitate meetings, and easily locate resources through a secure and centralised portal.

As more and more Twitter workers across the world — such as employees in the now closed Delhi and Mumbai offices — were instructed to work from home, remote working tools like Slack are to likely become the workers’ critical link to their teams. Losing it would not only affect their productivity, but also their confidence in a company that has been on a turbulent journey since the $44 billion takeover in October 2022. The interrupted functioning of communication services such as the company’s Slack could also affect Twitter’s ability to respond to emergencies, such as the then-ongoing earthquake relief efforts in Turkey and Syria.

Furthermore, news of Twitter’s Slack going down came days before the New York Times announced over the weekend that the social media company was firing at least 200 employees — roughly 10% of its workforce — to possibly cut costs yet again. With more re-assigned work and employee departures, Slack and other company communications tools are needed for the remaining workers to coordinate their efforts.

The Platformer cited an employee anonymously venting about their job on the Blind app, who said that Slack histories helped them solve their queries after other employees resigned or were fired following Mr. Musk’s takeover.

How does this disrupt their work?

Without Slack, some employees reportedly decided to take the day off while others tried resorting to email in order to reach their colleagues. Another Twitter tool, Jira, which helps staff manage the service, also stopped functioning for a day and this further added to employees’ confusion and panic. However, Jira later began working again.

Slack came down around the time that Mr. Musk promised that Twitter would make its algorithm open source in the final week of February. On February 22, Mr. Musk tweeted that the algorithm would at first disappoint users but that it would improve rapidly. Naturally, the burden of delivering on this promise fell to Twitter’s engineers — who were at the time probably struggling to figure out what was wrong with their Slack account.

In past weeks, Mr. Musk has also revealed plans to monetise Twitter features, such as verified checkmarks for organisations and the previously free API.

Twitter has also garnered the ire of the EU over its inadequate report on fighting disinformation. An official said that Twitter’s report lagged behind other tech platforms, especially during Russia’s invasion and its “full-blown disinformation war.” Apart from this, Twitter has seen several outages across the world in the past three months. All in all, Twitter’s Slack woes come at a time when there is an extra high demand for the company to run a stable communication service infrastructure for its rapidly shrinking workforce.

Is Twitter’s Slack back?

Not exactly. Citing an internal company email, Zoe Schiffer of The Platformer reported on Tuesday that Twitter would be bringing back the company Slack, but that it was archiving old channels in order to ease the burden on the support team.

According to the email, Twitter reportedly had over 88,000 Slack channels. Tech outlet The Verge reported on Monday that Mr. Musk also shut off access to employees’ Google Chat around the time of the latest layoffs at the company.

• While companies cannot function safely without enterprise-grade communication tools, a vast Big Tech company like Twitter whose offices and employees are scattered across the world are extra dependent on their messaging services and resource hubs.
• In the penultimate week of February, Twitter’s staff was reportedly told that their company’s Slack instance was under “routine maintenance” and couldn’t be used, according to tech outlet The Platformer.
• Tech outlet The Verge reported on Monday that Mr. Musk also shut off access to employees’ Google Chat around the time of the latest layoffs at the company.