Slack to retire its status account on Elon Musk’s X

Workplace messaging app Slack is retiring its status update account on X – formerly Twitter – where it previously shared updates about issues such as outages on the platform. “We made the decision to retire the @SlackStatus account,” the company posted on X. “We’ll continue to share other Slack news and provide support through our main account, @SlackHQ,” it said. The X account had been a useful source of information about ongoing issues with the platform and about problems being investigated by the company. Slack said it is consolidating news related to incidents in its status site. “Moving forward, the Slack Status site, https://status.slack.com, will be the source of truth for all incident news,” the company noted, adding that users can also reach out at feedback@slack.com “with any questions or feedback.” “Alerts will also be available through the RSS and Atom feeds linked at the bottom of the Slack Status home page,” Slack noted. Slack has undergone a number of technical issues this year with the app going offline during the workday for many users globally multiple times. The latest move by Slack to stop providing updates via its status account on X comes as the number of daily active users has declined on the social media platform following Tesla chief Elon Musk’s purchase of the company last year. X chief Linda Yaccarino said earlier this year that the company had about 225 million daily active users at the time – marking a decline of over 10 per cent of users from just before Mr Musk acquired the company. Market intelligence firm Similarweb also noted in a report recently that X’s global traffic is down by about 14 per cent year-on-year in September. Similarweb said the drop in user retention is “a bad sign for app user loyalty” for Twitter following the launch of rival app Threads by Instagram. Mr Musk also noted in July that the platform’s ad revenue was down 50 per cent as social media competition mounts. Other companies, including American Express and Air France have also stopped providing customer service over X. American Express had made its @AskAmex account private, while AirFrance said in April that it would stop offering support to customers via direct messages on the social media platform, The Verge reported. Read More Tesla’s profits dip as Musk goes on rant about staff working from home Elon Musk’s X may charge some users $1 a year to post on platform EU to investigate X’s handling of disinformation over Hamas attack on Israel Could X’s creditors push the social media company into bankruptcy? Slack down: Work chat app goes down as the working day begins Why taking a mental health day could be bad… for your mental health