Remote work has become the norm, and for many teams, seamless communication is essential to getting things done. But what happens when your primary tool goes down?
Just this morning, Slack was down, and I had a realization—my team had no backup way to communicate. No email thread, no alternative chat, nothing. We were completely cut off, waiting for Slack to come back online.
It wasn’t always like this. When I first started as a developer, communication wasn’t centralized. Everyone had their own preferred chat app. AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Facebook Chat, MSN, Pidgin. It didn’t matter. I used the Empathy client on Ubuntu, juggling Bonjour and Yahoo seamlessly. If one service went down, we’d just switch to another without skipping a beat.
But today? That flexibility is gone. Chat protocols are a solved problem, yet we now live in the era of walled gardens. Every service is proprietary, locking users into closed ecosystems. Just look at Apple, doing everything possible to keep iMessage from working with non-Apple devices.
Rather than just complaining about it, though, let this be a lesson: never put all your eggs in one basket. If your team relies entirely on a single communication tool, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Having a backup channel—even if it’s rarely used—ensures that when an outage happens, you’re not left scrambling.
So take a few minutes today to set up an alternative. Your future self will thank you when Slack (or Teams, or Discord) inevitably goes down again.