Talk to us!

Ethan Chikowore
Compliance Specialist
Squirrel™ Technical Security

‍

‍

What was the February Slack Outage?

Slack suffered a system outage on the 26/02/2025, taking a vast majority of users offline and causing confusion and disruption among Slack users, being one of the most used operating work systems in our industry. The cause of the outage had been identified as a database maintenance issue leading to multiple features becoming unavailable. At approximately 3:27pm GMT, Slack shared a status that they started to notice multiple reports indicating users had trouble accessing Slack. Other websites such as DownDetector had also picked up on this as they began to see a large influx in user reports at around the same time Slack had updated users. Roughly 20 minutes later (3:48pm GMT), Slack posted an update stating that they determined that API endpoints, the messaging feature and Thread loading had been massively impacted. Personally, I experienced trouble signing into Slack on the Desktop app, but found the Mobile app still up and running. A few updates later, Slack had also concluded that “Users may also continue to experience issues when attempting to log-in” (4:30pm GMT).

Slack has suffered a similar incident before on July 27, 2023 where a management change of the internal system communication caused a huge problem with users being unable to send or receive messages. Slack has been criticised for their centralised design which causes many issues as one incident can take down the whole system. This seems to be the same situation happening again. 

‍

How could Logging and Monitoring prevent this?

Logging and monitoring is critical to the functioning of system maintenance, and looks to have had some issues in the Slack maintenance cycle. Logging records events that have happened such as when a user logs in, creating a timestamp to store that record at that exact time (27/03/2025 09:26am GMT). Monitoring focuses on the effective performance of a system and analyses those logs for any suspicious activity that need to be mitigated. System and network administrators may use these techniques to keep on top of system maintenance and ensure effective security. For healthtech innovators, especially those supplying to the NHS, logging and monitoring is an essential part of the DTAC standard (Technical Security section), so you’ll need to implement logging and monitoring to be DTAC compliant.

‍

Stuck on how to implement logging and Monitoring?

Book a free discovery call with us to discover how we can help you to implement logging and monitoring, a significant part of ISO standards such as 27001, 13485 and 42001 and of course the DTAC Framework. We’re here to help.

‍