Slack is retiring its status account on X that provided updates on issues and outages on the platform. In an interview, Kevin Albers, Slack’s VP for customer experience, explained that the @SlackStatus account was retired to consolidate communications around incidents and focus resources on the most widely used resources.
The @SlackStatus account let people know when Slack was having problems. Many reporters, including those at The Verge who write about outages, followed the account. It could also be tracked on TweetDeck. Now, Slack says the best ways to check the status are on their main status page or by contacting @SlackHQ directly. You can also subscribe to Slack’s RSS or Atom feeds for alerts.
Other companies have limited their use of X too. American Express made its customer support account private in August. Air France told customers last April it stopped using X direct messages for help since Twitter changed some rules, likely about its pricing tiers.
While useful for some, maintaining separate social profiles takes resources away from core offerings. Slack wants to focus on the tools its customers rely on the most. This means streamlining status updates to the official site and main X account. Time will tell if users still find the information as easily without the dedicated status handle. But for Slack, consolidating communications is the priority over ancillary X presence.
