Are You Ready For the Next Slack Outage?

Thousands of workplaces were stymied by a Slack outage earlier this week. While representatives from the company have yet to provide a reason for the downtime, it provided a sobering warning for its 12 million daily active users: You need to have a backup plan. 

The centralized nature of most communication platforms, however, has meant that any downtime makes its clients come to a screeching halt.

Businesses, especially those that rely on a distributed or remote workforce should learn from its recent outage and adopt a strategy for the next time it goes down:

Set up a phone tree: It sounds outdated, but keeping a chart of the contact information of both employees and contractors within your company can be crucial to preventing the ensuing chaos from an outage of Slack, Google, Microsoft or any other office communication provider. Find one point of contact for at least two other points of contact to cascade the message if office communications are down.  

Create a mailing list: Email has been around since the 1970s when the first purpose of the internet was to help government agencies and universities communicate in the event of nuclear war. It’s resilient in a way that internet-based applications can only dream of being. Keep a list of clients, contractors, employees and anyone else who may be affected by a service outage up to date and on-hand to respond first thing so as to prevent confusion and lost time.

Provide tasks lists ahead of time: In most VFX agencies, there’s always something for someone to be working on. Keeping an organized list of tasks and priorities means having a set of clear instructions on hand even if the standard methods of communication aren’t immediately available. Consider using a project management system with clearly defined tasks, due dates and objectives to make sure everyone can continue to operate without a central hub of communication. At Nodal, we like Asana and Monday, but there are several alternatives that may be better suited for your workflow.