Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge
Slack is retiring its status account on X that previously shared updates about issues and outages on the platform, the company announced on Thursday. “We made the decision to retire the @SlackStatus account in order to consolidate our communications around incidents and focus resources on those most widely used by our customers,” Kevin Albers, VP of customer experience at Slack, said in a statement to The Verge.
The account was a useful way to be notified when Slack was investigating problems, especially for those of us at The Verge who end up writing about those issues. (It was also a good account to monitor with TweetDeck — which is now called XPro and is only available to paying X Premium subscribers.) If you want to keep tabs on Slack’s status moving forward, Albers pointed to Slack’s main status page and said that “we’re also happy to answer any questions related to incidents from our main account, @SlackHQ.” You can also get alerts by subscribing to Slack’s RSS and Atom feeds.
X sent an autoreply to my request for comment: “Busy now, please check back later.”
We have made the decision to retire this account. Moving forward, the Slack Status site, https://t.co/pvGy3wW3MN, will be the source of truth for all incident news. Alerts will also be available through the RSS and Atom feeds linked at the bottom of the Slack Status home page.
— Slack Status (@SlackStatus) October 19, 2023
Other companies have also reduced their investment in X. American Express, for example, made its @AskAmex account private and began telling customers it was inactive as early as August 1st. Air France, according to an April message, no longer does customer service over X direct messages “since Twitter has changed their conditions” (perhaps referring to X’s API pricing tiers it implemented earlier this year).
