Although with outages like these, I doubt it!
Well, you can probably infer the former from the dependency on the latter. You use these tools because they can reduce the scrambling when shit does hit the fan, not because they are necessary.
- You don't get GitHub notifications on pull requests and comments, so things don't get reviewed and merged if developers aren't in the habit of checking the PR tab on GitHub itself.
- You don't get CI notifications so you won't know how your latest test run or deploy is going without going straight into the CI service itself. Even worse when there's a failure and you're too used to having Slack warn you about that.
- Your team might depend on Slack so much that they don't know how else to efficiently communicate, and the most efficient channel to communicate a fallback is not available or rarely checked (e.g. email, face to face). So you get a lot of chaos as people come up with dozens of alternatives.
This is just poor discipline more than anything, putting too many structural eggs into one basket, but it doesn't change the fact that Slack has created that dependency.
If anyone on my team came to me and cited Slack being down as a reason for their inability to do their job, then they wouldn't be on my team.
Is it less than ideal? Yes. Is it a little bit less efficient to pull info instead of having it pushed to you? Yes.
Is the sky falling? No.
* your hdd failed? Use a raid
* your power went out? Use a UPS
* your DNS went down? Use a fallback (slack2)
* your whole datacenter flooded? Good thing you have multiple replicated cloud instances that seamlessly take over
See, these are the issues that "the cloud" was supposed to solve. Not give us the same problems as before, just with a recurring bill for "chat as a service".
And inb4 "chill Mike it's just a chat server not life support firmware" yeah but slack is the most trivial software you can think of: send text from one computer to another. I see no reason this service can't be nearly as reliable as life support firmware in 2018. We've had over 30 years to get this right. Raise the fricking bar.
Eventually somebody is going to die because their pacemaker decided to throw cycles at mining monero.
2) Geodistributed datacenters is VERY expensive thing, so not implemented fully.
3) Bad system design, full of "one point of failure".
You buy servers on aws-us-west and aws-us-east, and sync them . How is that very expensive?
Geodistributed datacenter requires multiple direct low-latency multigigabit/sec connectivity, special software to manage, test and check it, skilled devops.
There was no accusation of "so easy", only so not expensive and supposedly (and previously, demonstraby) solved in the last 30 years.
They may well be "hard" or even "expensive" for some definition of those two words, but if it weren't, it would defeat much of the (stated/advertised) purpose of outsourcing/cloud.
This is like saying that food service at 30k feet in a passenger airline is trivial because all the server has to do is walk up and down a narrow aisle handing out food from a cart.
Since "you see no reason this service can't be nearly as reliable as life support firmware", one of two things must be true:
1) You know something nobody else knows. In which case great, you've stumbled on a huge opportunity to go put your knowledge to work and get stupendously rich by outcompeting this "trivial" software company. Get to it, genius!
or
2) The reason you "see no reason..." is that you're unaware of one or more relevant facts.
Which of these do you think is more probable?