How companies can handle crises through social media in this day and age? Slack gives the perfect example

Slack, an online messaging service, experienced a pervasive outage in February 2022, preventing many users from accessing the site. The issue was ultimately tracked back to a setup change that resulted in a rise in activity on the company’s database system.

Users on the platform could not send or receive messages, upload files, or join channels, and were completely shut out from the desktop application.

System failures are almost unavoidable for technology-based companies like slack, and even the most sophisticated and large-scale technology-based companies cannot be completely error-free, so it is important for them to be skilled in handling such crises.

It’s not the company’s fault that the situation arose, but the biggest question is how to eliminate negative user sentiment while actively addressing the technical issues.

Following considerable social media chatter, Slack issued a brief, powerless statement to impacted users: “Sorry we can’t be more specific — this is one of those cases where we, too, don’t know what’s gone wrong.”

And soon, Slack shared frequent updates on its status page throughout the five-hour event to keep users informed about their work toward a solution, even calling out mistakes they made along the way.

These messages, which were uploaded roughly every hour, clearly detailed the company’s efforts to reinstate complete access for all customers. They also used Twitter to interact with users in a genuine yet contrite tone.

The way Slack handled the problem was very direct and effective. First of all, the speed of the response was a satisfying experience for the users. What the audience and the users needed most was an immediate response and feedback, because it also represented the brand’s attitude of wanting to solve the problem.

The second is to face the problem without hiding and being frank. The first thing slack does is not to cover up when the situation is uncertain, but to describe the problem, even if the mastery of the situation is not complete, but this progress will give users and audiences a sense of control, thus reducing panic.

Finally, there is the progress report on every detail. Slack has created a separate page to publicly display the progress of the problem, which will certainly put most users at ease. With a channel to care about the progress of the problem, slack also inadvertently reduced the pressure of public relations, and frankly described the progress of the solution, regaining the trust of users.