Monday January 6, 2025

Beginning around November 22, 2024 until January 16, 2025, some users on the desktop versions of Slack experienced unexpected behavior with sidebar bolding & badging for direct messages (DMs), group DMs, and channels. This caused users to miss unread messages within these conversations.

We initially were tracking reports from affected users, but on January 6, 2025, we noticed an unexpected increase of reports causing us to initiate our incident response processes.

As an initial fix, we rolled out a change to the backend logic to correct the timestamp and store correct values so the client triggered the appropriate badging & bolding notifications. While this fix resolved the initial badging & bolding behavior, it unexpectedly caused an issue with badging counts, resulting in displaying an incorrect number of unread messages as well as not marking a channels read state correctly. We promptly reversed this change to avoid further impact.

We continued our investigation efforts and discovered an additional cause within the backend logic checks related to how a message is routed to the client. This check ensures the client is fetching the proper information that triggers the notification badging & bolding. We adjusted the problematic logic within this check to ensure the proper data is fetched when triggering a notification, resolving the issue for affected users.

Throughout this incident, we adjusted our strategy on how to best handle incoming reports from affected users, which impacted updates on our status site. As more users reported experiencing this issue, we then resumed our status site updates.

We apologize for any confusion and disruptions to your work day and appreciate your patience as we worked to resolve this issue for all affected users.

3:52 PM PST

We have deployed a fix to resolve the badging issues and your notifications should now be functioning as expected. If you have any further trouble, please write to us at feedback@slack.com. 

Thank you for sticking with us while we worked on this. We very much appreciate your patience and understanding.

9:09 PM PST

Our efforts to fully resolve this issue is still ongoing. While we haven't resolved this yet, we will provide further updates directly through support tickets with impacted users.

If you’re experiencing this behavior, please reach out to us at feedback@slack.com. We apologize for the trouble and appreciate your patience as we sort this out.

12:58 PM PST

We've identified the cause of the badging issues with older DMs and are working on a fix.

There are additional behaviors related to the badging issues with these DMs that we are investigating and working to restore full functionality. Other notifications, such as app icon badges, sounds, and banners, may still be functioning properly. We appreciate your patience and will share updates as our work continues.

3:43 PM PST

We believe we may have isolated the cause of problem and we’re focused on getting Slack working again as soon as possible. We'll continue to surface any new updates as they come in. 

11:54 AM PST

Our investigation is still ongoing, we'll be back with another update once we have news to share. We appreciate your continued patience as we sort this out.

3:33 PM PST

We are continuing to investigate this issue, but we don’t have any new information to share at this time. We’ll be back when we have some new information to share with you. Thank you for your patience! 

12:45 PM PST

Some users may be experiencing issues with their sidebars not being badged/bolded for new DMs and channel notifications. 

We’ll be back with another update as soon as we have more information to share. 

9:48 AM PST