Learn from Slack

The Day Slack Went Silent:
Mastering Cloud Scaling After the 2021 Outage

On the first workday of 2021, Slack suffered a major outage, impacting millions. Incident Drill helps your team practice responding to similar cloud scaling challenges and avoid costly downtime.

Slack | 2021 | Outage (Cloud)
Practice This Scenario →

The Scaling Nightmare

Modern applications face unpredictable load surges. The Slack outage highlighted the critical need for robust and scalable infrastructure. A seemingly small misconfiguration in the AWS Transit Gateway cascaded into a major failure, emphasizing the importance of proactive testing and incident readiness.

PREPARE YOUR TEAM

Incident Drill: Prepare for the Unexpected

Incident Drill allows you to simulate real-world incidents like the Slack outage in a safe, controlled environment. Practice your team's response, identify weaknesses in your infrastructure, and build confidence in your ability to handle high-pressure situations with realistic scenarios and actionable insights.

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Realistic Simulations

Experience the pressure of a real incident without the consequences.

🔎

Root Cause Analysis

Uncover the underlying causes of failures and prevent them from happening again.

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Team Collaboration

Improve communication and coordination during critical incidents.

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Performance Tracking

Measure your team's progress and identify areas for improvement.

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Cloud-Native Focus

Specifically designed for cloud infrastructure and services.

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Post-Incident Reviews

Analyze your response and learn from past mistakes.

WHY TEAMS PRACTICE THIS

Unlock Peak Performance Under Pressure

  • ✓ Reduce Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR)
  • ✓ Improve System Reliability and Uptime
  • ✓ Enhance Team Communication and Collaboration
  • ✓ Proactively Identify Infrastructure Weaknesses
  • ✓ Build Confidence in Your Incident Response
  • ✓ Minimize the Impact of Future Outages
00:00
Holiday ends, users return to work.
00:15
Sudden surge in network traffic. Error
00:30
AWS Transit Gateway scaling limits reached.
01:00
Slack services become unavailable. Error
04:00
Services gradually restored. Success

How It Works

1

Step 1: Simulate the Surge

Recreate the initial traffic spike that triggered the Slack outage.

2

Step 2: Identify the Bottleneck

Pinpoint the AWS Transit Gateway as the point of failure.

3

Step 3: Implement Scaling Solutions

Test different scaling strategies to handle the increased load.

4

Step 4: Validate and Monitor

Ensure your solutions are effective and proactively monitor for future issues.

EXPLORE MORE

Related Incidents

AWS us-east-1 Outage → Akamai DNS Outage → Amazon Kinesis Outage →

Ready to Prevent Your Own Outage?

Join the Incident Drill waitlist and be the first to access simulations based on real-world incidents like the Slack New Year Outage. Prepare your team for anything.

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