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Slack Halloween outage
Tuesday, October 31 2017
It was Halloween, which is an important holiday for me. Still, I'm lazy, and had put no effort into any sort of costume and wouldn't be going anywhere anyway, so why bother? There was, however, a costume contest happening in one of The Organization's Slack channels. Since it took the form of static pictures of people in outfits, why not just submit a photoshopped chimera of my head on some creature's body? At first I thought of maybe putting my head on some bird's body, though it would have to be a tawny-colored bird to have any hope of matching my skin color (and even that would require playing around with hue and saturation). A good candidate would've been a barn owl, but my head was going to be far too big to fit appropriately on an owl's neck. So instead I went with a classic I've done before with Suzy, one of my trolls: I put my head on the body of a naked mole rat. The skin color of a naked mole rat is almost exactly that of a Caucasian human, so all I really had to do was get the lighting right. This was the result:
My outfit!
Suzy as a naked mole rat, several years ago.
It turned out that the halloween channel hadn't even been publicized yet, and my entry was the very first one.
I had a somewhat stressful afternoon as I realized that one of my tallying algorithms was double counting under some scenarios, and the only saving grace was that it was tucked away in a cron job that had been broken for months. The double counting was only apparent in a totally different database that used the exact same code but contained an entirely different (and much smaller) data set. Once I had that straightened up and got the cron job working, the stress dissipated and I could enjoy my job once more.
At a little after 4:00pm east coast time, I noticed that Slack was down. And it really was down; the rest of the internet was fine, and it was already a topic of lively discussion on Twitter. Despite the continued working of the internet, the absence of Slack made me feel cut-off from my colleagues. We had a brief email exchange to agree that yep, Slack was down, and I even posted a message to all the employees in The Organization so they wouldn't think the problem was on their respective ends. But without the constant banter, emojis, and occasional animated GIFs, the remote workplace felt very lonely in a way that it normally never does. Slack returned at a little before 9:00pm eastern time, but by then Gretchen and I were watching Stranger Things. For me, Halloween is a legitimate holiday even if I have to work, so I was definitely drinking.
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