Twitter Shuts Off Slack Access For Employees

Twitter employees lost access to Slack this week after the company manually switched it off, Platformer reports(Opens in a new window).

Jira, a feature progress-tracking tool that Twitter engineers use to ship code, also stopped working before being restored on Thursday, leading to engineers taking days off because they were unable to communicate with colleagues or ship code.

Twitter reportedly told its employees that Slack was down for “routine maintenance.” This was however slapped down by a Slack staffer who told Platformer “there is no such thing as routine maintenance.” Slack, which posts the status of any maintenance checks and incidents here(Opens in a new window), notably did not report any maintenance work on Wednesday(Opens in a new window), Thursday(Opens in a new window), or Friday(Opens in a new window) this week.

As Platformer notes in its report, employees took to the anonymous workplace chat app Blind, to complain about Slack being taken offline. One reportedly linked the outage to Twitter being behind on payments, saying,  “we didn’t pay our Slack bill, now everyone is barely working. Penny wise, pound foolish.” Another said Slack’s deactivation was the “proverbial final straw” that “pushed” them to start looking for jobs outside Twitter.

The lack of Slack access has also left employees unable to find helpful nuggets of institutional information stored in conversations, threads, and notes that can assist them when stuck for answers to questions. It’s not clear if Twitter has restored Slack access, is planning to in the future, or has got rid of it entirely; Twitter did not immediately respond to a clarification request.

The Slack outage is the latest in a string of cost-cutting efforts that the social media site has made since billionaire Elon Musk completed his multi-billion takeover in October 2022. After laying off more than half its global workforce, the company closed a Sacramento data center, shut a Seattle office, and cut janitorial workers and security staff across the US.

Meanwhile, this week Twitter was sued by an AI content writing tech startup called Writer Inc for not paying a bill amounting to $113,856. The startup is reportedly the sixth company to sue Elon Musk’s Twitter for not paying them since October, CNBC reported(Opens in a new window). The other five include the company’s landlord for its San Francisco HQ, a private jet transportation service provider, an events-planning and production company, and two consulting firms.