Many people probably struggled when Slack was unusable due to an outage.

Taking advantage of this opportunity, I considered what would be good to use as alternative services when the main chat service becomes unusable due to outages.

Background: Slack Large-Scale Outage

On November 1st, from around 8 AM to 10 AM, for about 2 hours, Slack experienced a large-scale outage and was unusable.

• Update: Global outage of business chat service Slack, temporarily inaccessible - Engadget Japan

We're sincerely sorry for the service disruption you're seeing at the moment. We're working on it with top priority: https://t.co/hlhV4ZiG7E

— Slack (@SlackHQ) 2017年10月31日

I personally took the morning off, so it didn’t directly affect my work. However, I wanted to send a morning leave reminder message on Slack and launched the Slack iOS app, but it wouldn’t connect at all, which was a bit troublesome.

slack 繋がらない、と pic.twitter.com/ebjXgSFyfE

— シゲオカ タダシ (@codenote_net) 2017年10月31日

Alternative Chat Services

I considered several chat services to use temporarily when Slack goes down.

Email

“It’ll probably be restored in a few hours, so let’s get by with email temporarily” is not a bad idea. Rather than incurring the cost of introducing and maintaining alternative chat services, I think using email, which almost everyone regardless of age or gender can use, would be better.

Email traffic would temporarily increase, which might be painful though.

Google Meet

While writing this article, I was thinking “What’s the name of Google’s chat service?” which shows its recognition level, but it seems to be called Meet.

• Try Meet - Meet Help

There were various similar services like Google Talk and Hangouts Chat, but the name doesn’t matter.

If you’re using G Suite (formerly Google Apps), I think the implementation hurdle is low, so you can immediately start group chat as a team.

• Try Meet - Meet Help
• Classic Hangouts Chat Settings - G Suite Administrator Help
• Google Talk, which allowed chatting while using Gmail, is finally gone, but Google's messaging environment remains complex as ever | TechCrunch Japan

We adopted this option. We started chatting on Google and Slack was restored immediately, so we ended up barely using it.

Discord

Recently, I’ve been hearing voices saying “Discord is good” here and there.

• Discord - Free Voice and Text Chat for Gamers

However, the larger the organization, the more preparation becomes difficult, such as having to create accounts in advance.

Hipchat

I used Hipchat before migrating to Slack.

• Hipchat | Group Chat, Video, Screen Sharing | Atlassian

Since several members who used Hipchat at that time are still in the company, I thought using a previously used chat service might be an option.

That’s all from the Gemba, where Slack outages didn’t interfere with work.