Slack suffers massive outage leaving thousands of employees unable to work from home 

Messaging service Slack has suffered a massive outage which has left thousands of Australians unable to work from home.

The failure was announced on Wednesday by monitoring service Slack Status who said there were reports of users unable to send messages and issues with the ‘timeout’ feature that blocks certain users. 

Users have also reported being unable to access the service at all while many messages that do go through are not being marked as ‘read’ when received. 

An update released after 10am said Slack would be investigating the error and some users may seen improvements already.  

The issues have affected both Slack’s main homepage and the dedicated app for users around the world. 

‘We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and will provide an update shortly,’ the monitoring account said.

Slack has become a crucial professional tool for thousands of Australians forced to work from home during the coronavirus pandemic. 

In March the company reported 12.5 million people had downloaded the professional communication app.