> I'll take this moment to remind everyone of their human tendency to read meaning into random events. There's no evidence to suggest New Year traffic has caused this, and outages like this can happen in spite of professional and competent preparation.
On the one hand, sure we don't specifically know what's going on. On the other hand, it's the first Monday in the new year and they went down shortly after the start of the business day Eastern time; it could be coincidence, but it would be a remarkable coincidence.
There are a load of ways NY might have contributed to this, but it may not be a direct cause. What's more likely, Slack forgetting to scale their deployment back up after too much mulled wine, or a number of people on holiday meaning a simple failure has developed into something more serious?
It could be anything really- my post was more about how situations like this can happen to even the most prepared. The assumption it has something to do with NY tends to assume very trivial, silly mistakes. Especially with no information, that seems a bit uncharitable.
It seemingly worked ok in UTC-2 in the morning and early afternoon, then started having issues and is now a bit intermittent (or fixed, there's not much traffic on my channels, as it's evening already). Do they have that much more traffic on US east coast than in Europe?
Probably, but it was only 2-3pm UK time when it started falling over so there would be all the Europe traffic plus the East Coast traffic starting to sign in.
On the one hand, sure we don't specifically know what's going on. On the other hand, it's the first Monday in the new year and they went down shortly after the start of the business day Eastern time; it could be coincidence, but it would be a remarkable coincidence.