On February 26, 2025, organizations using Slack faced significant disruptions, causing frustration and productivity challenges across many businesses. During this widespread Slack outage, Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX) and Zscaler Copilot proved invaluable for IT teams scrambling to troubleshoot issues and restore services quickly. By combining advanced analytics with conversational AI, Zscaler empowers IT teams to resolve problems faster than ever before.
Let’s explore how the Zscaler Copilot came to the rescue during this incident.
Zscaler Copilot: Instantly Identifying Slack Issues
Imagine you're the IT lead tasked with troubleshooting Slack for Barry, an employee reporting issues over the past six hours. Instead of digging through logs or manually cross-referencing events, Zscaler Copilot makes the process effortless.
Zscaler Copilot instantly identifying the outage through natural language
With a simple prompt like, “Troubleshoot Slack issues for Barry in the last 6 hours,” Copilot leverages ZDX’s powerful AI capabilities to run an instant check, analyzing all potential factors affecting Slack’s performance. In seconds, Copilot highlights everything from network health to application-level indicators, pinpointing the root cause of the disruption.
This ability to ask natural-language questions reduces troubleshooting time and allows IT teams to proactively address issues before they escalate.
Visibility Into the Slack Outage
ZDX also played a pivotal role during this Slack outage by quickly detecting a significant decline in user experience scores for Slack services. Leveraging the ZDX heatmap, IT teams could instantly see the geographic concentration of the impact. This level of visibility allowed service desks to determine that the problem was external—centered on Slack itself—rather than an internal network or device issue.
ZDX dashboard showing the Slack outage
Additionally, according to insights from Zscaler Hosted Monitoring, Slack experienced a global outage, with all locations across Europe and Americas reporting 500 errors when attempting to connect to the service. Zscaler Hosted Monitoring is a proactive monitoring solution that continuously measures the performance and availability of critical applications by running synthetic transactions from Zscaler locations around the globe.
Zscaler Hosted Monitoring identifies 500 errors globally
The ZDX dashboard provided IT teams with the ability to quickly identify Slack as the root cause of the disruption, ensuring internal resources were not wasted on misdirected troubleshooting efforts.
ZDX dashboard indicating Slack issues
Proactive Monitoring with AI-Powered Root-Cause Analysis
Like every major incident, time and resources are critical when application outages occur. ZDX’s AI-powered root-cause analysis simplifies this process by automatically detecting and correlating potential issues across the entire data path—from the user to the application.
ZDX automated root cause analysis identifies slack application issues in minutes
By isolating the Slack outage, IT teams avoided unnecessary escalations, reduced downtime, and maintained operational efficiency—continuing to ensure a seamless user experience for all other applications.
Why Quick, Targeted Insights Matter
The value of tools like ZDX lies in their ability to deliver:
- Proactive monitoring: ZDX automatically sets smart alerts for performance changes, ensuring problems are identified before users are significantly impacted.
- Streamlined troubleshooting: Zscaler Copilot removes the guesswork, allowing IT teams to quickly troubleshoot and resolve issues in seconds by simply asking questions.
- Clear root cause identification: Advanced analytics identify whether outages are related to applications, networks, endpoints, or intermediate providers.
When users began reporting Slack disruptions on February 26, ZDX monitored performance trends, providing actionable insights into metrics like HTTP response codes and application reachability. Simultaneously, Copilot offered human-like assistance, enabling IT to drill into specific incidents without wading through raw data.
Making IT Teams Confident and Efficient
ZDX's capabilities empower IT teams with the visibility and confidence needed to differentiate external issues (like the Slack outage) from internal problems, saving valuable time and resources. By reducing mean time to diagnosis (MTTD) and mean time to resolution (MTTR), organizations can focus their energy on what matters—minimizing disruptions, improving user productivity, and maintaining trust with employees and stakeholders.
Want to See ZDX in Action?
The Slack outage is just one example of how ZDX simplifies IT challenges, turning complex outages into manageable events. Whether it's Slack, Microsoft Outlook, or another critical application, ZDX ensures IT teams are informed, proactive, and always a step ahead.
Get in touch with us today or explore Zscaler Digital Experience via the ZDX Playlist on YouTube or the zscaler.com/zdx page. See how ZDX and Copilot can revolutionize your organization’s approach to performance management and user experience.
Be prepared for the next outage—ensure your IT team is powered by ZDX to handle whatever comes next.
