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Dear Slack: Your service is down, it's not "slow performance".

Be honest to your customers, or I will make sure our team switches to Microsoft Teams.



Please don’t punish your coworkers like that just for your personal pleasure.


We have both Slack and Teams. Almost everyone I know who has an option picks Slack.


Yep, Slack certainly has major performance/memory usage issues. And somehow Teams is even worse.


I've never used Teams, but if everyone prefers Slack over it, it must be horrible.


Teams is a nightmare. Instead of just creating the simple chat that everyone was just asking for, they went full PhD and created a mix between a chat and a forum.

A Teams "channel" has counter intuitive behavior, the messages you send are more like forum threads, users can reply to them, and when that happens it reorders the whole messages to put that one at the bottom. It makes it impossible to "catch up" on a channel since people will happily reply to any messages so the ordering is completely random.

There is also a completely counter intuitive distinction between "groups chats" and "channels".

Teams is also the only chat service I know where there is an actual limit on the number of non-public channels you can have. After 30 channels have been created, you're doomed.

Want to remove an existing channel to make room for a new one? Nope, you cannot remove a channel, only "archive" them. Archived channels are removed after 30 days and there is no way to force their removal early. So basically if you reach 30 channels you have to wait minimum 30 days to create a new one.

Did I mention the UI is slow as hell, and half the screen space is used by unnecessary large padding between messages? I am rarely able to have more than 3/4 messages displayed on a 23" screen.

The only positive point of Teams is integration with outlook 365 and meetings. It works really well, quality is good, reliable, nice UI, présentation mode, screen share, etc


Teams is too corporate IMHO. The video chat is really good from experience though.

Everywhere I've worked Slack's basically a free for all, can add custom emojis and create private channels etc.

Teams was always more locked down. One place even disabled the GIF feature!

I know you can lock down Slack too but nowhere I've been has bothered to do so.


> The video chat is really good from experience though.

I have had a few people on calls with poor connection speeds. It degrades horribly by stuttering and distorting audio. It performs worse than a phone call. The best fix would be for Australia to fix its woeful internet.

When you load the web interface it identifies each person with their initials, not full name. This isn’t helpful when you have never met the person before.


There are a lot of other adjectives between "slack-like" and horrible.

I've used teams in the past and it's not that bad. It's a valid alternative to slack imho.


I don't know, I hate Slack. It's slow, bloated, can't even keep up with my typing on a brand new Ryzen and it doesn't even do conversations well.

I know I sound like a Zulip shill, but try that for a bit and you'll see the difference, I love it.


I prefer Slack too, but I'd like my services to be reliable and not go down on a regular basis.


Microsoft Teams had a major outage just last week. Every major service like this has issues sometimes.


Their status page is annoying me more and more with these recent outages.

Recalling the incidents in September, it's a bit cheeky they call that "99.93%" uptime (30 mins of downtime).

Having remembered that there were at _least_ 2 seperate 1 hour+ incidents where I was struggling to send messages in Sept, I went through to look at the history, and they seem to have purposefully hidden these incidents on the calendar. There's no way of listing incidents in a month.

The information and accessibility of the status page is obviously politically motivated by marketing.


If companies were honest, they would multiply downtime by the number of users at the time. Because of course, great uptime doesn't matter if it's only uptime when no one is using it in the middle of the night.

It's like when trains report 95% on time, except that the times when the service is delayed is when the trains are full. All the delays that actual people experience (person-hours) happen in that 5%.


Didn’t Teams just have a massive outage too?


Azure AD had a massive outage


But they did call it an outage.


Its interesting, I looked at that page earlier (~1145 EST) and it was actually tagged as an "Outage" rather than the "Incident" it is right now.

For me it has only been slow performance all morning. Its not good, but not what I would call "down" either. At least from my perspective. I could have a bunch of other folks who are completely unable to send messages and I just can't tell.


the update says:

>Some users may be unable to connect to Slack, while others are still experiencing general performance issues.


You mean Zulip.


Are you suggesting Microsoft has a more accurate status page? Honest question, I have no experience with their cloud services.


Zulip has been great for our team




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