When Slack went down for over three hours on Wednesday, office workers worldwide who depend on the business chat app found themselves preparing for the apocalypse.
At least that's the way they felt, based on Twitter reactions.
This was the notification no one ever hoped to encounter at work.
The panic was real. People couldn't even send GIFs, memes, or other workplace distractions to colleagues.
So, now what?
Some workers dramatically reverted to a more archaic method of correspondence.
But much like the Y2k scare––when the world braced themselves as the calendar reached January 1, 2000––everything turned out just fine.
Still, workers used to relying on the messaging app to communicate with their coworkers in neighboring cubicles had to resort to other forms of office interaction.
The staff over at Slate shared how they coped with the digital black-out. Shirley Chan wrote:
During the great slack outage I emailed a lot and tweeted about how much I enjoyed emailing. I had an email thread with the usual people I share memes and talk nonsense with on Slack, finally replied to emails I've been putting off from a police officer and someone from Panoply … I think that's all. I also Twitter DM'd memes about the Slack outage to Nitish.
Rachelle Hampton had an easier solution:
I just talked out loud.
Maybe that's a good thing.
It could be a matter of time before we reconnect the old-fashioned way. Because retro is always in, amirite?
Eventually, things returned to normal and all was right with the world.
