Slack is down, forcing workers everywhere to resort to sending mass emails as the collaboration app tackles a major outage.

The communication tool, which passed six million daily users in 2017, warned that “all workspaces are experiencing difficulties”.

Downdetector, which tracks outages with popular applications, showed the US, UK and mainland Europe were having the most difficulty.

Naturally, people responded to the issue with a sense of calm equanimity online.

The issue began at 2.33pm BST, with Slack posting the following update to its status page an hour later: “We are continuing to work on fixing the connection problems that have been impacting folks. We hope to have the issue fully resolved as soon as possible.”

On Twitter, Slack posted: “We’re working hard to isolate the issue. Thanks for your patience!”

However, with the investigation ongoing, it’s not clear yet what’s caused the issue, though Cloud Pro has approached Slack for more information.

The firm runs its platform on top of Amazon Web Services (AWS) – EC2 instances for basic compute, S3 for user uploads and static assets, Elastic Load Balancing to distribute workloads across EC2, and EBS for overnight backups.

“As a company, our business is integral to our customers’ daily lives,” Richard Crowley, Slack’s director of operations, is quoted as saying on AWS’s website.

“So in our customers’ eyes, our security controls and ability to deliver a reliable service become incredibly important, and it’s a responsibility we take incredibly seriously.”

Slack debuted new developer tools last month designed to allow them to code and test their own Slack apps within the Slack platform, as well as coming with built-in integrations for third-party apps popular with coders; Asana, Bitbucket, HubSpot, Zendesk and Jira.

The collaboration tool isn’t the only service to experience issues recently, with Office 365 dropping offline for UK users earlier this month, as well as back in April.