When Slack suffered a crippling 64-minute outage this morning, the downtime did more than just enrage users and resurrect the #Slackdown hashtag. It also ignited a $550 million plunge in Slack stock (NYSE: WORK).
64 Minutes of Virtual Office Pain
The outage, as CCN reported, began at roughly 10:50 am ET and lingered for more than an hour. Initially, the communications app struggled with slow loading times and messages that refused to send, though users later reported an inability to access their workspaces at all.
#Slack is down for a nanosecond…
Twitter… pic.twitter.com/LmHYEquddV
— Where in the world is Ross Sandiego? (@beet_keeper) July 29, 2019
Slack had resolved the issue by the time most East Coast users had gone on their lunch breaks, but there’s one place the problem hasn’t disappeared: the New York Stock Exchange.
Slack Stock Tumbles, Market Cap Evaporates
Slack shares had already stumbled out of the gate, and the decline worsened as word of the outage spread. WORK ultimately slipped as low as $32.51 – a 4.7% decline from Monday’s open at $34.10.
Heading toward the closing bell, Slack stock trades at $33.00 for a decline of 3.2%.
While not severe from a per-share standpoint, that translates into a $550 million market cap wipeout for the Silicon Valley darling. That’s nearly $8.6 million for every minute that Slack was down.
The outage and corresponding valuation plunge are emblematic of what has been a painful month for Slack, which had been one of the year’s most highly-anticipated IPOs prior to its NYSE debut a month ago.
Though technically trading well above their $26 IPO price, WORK shares have plummeted 15% from their initial close at $38.62. They’ve also crashed more than 21% since peaking at $42 on that same day.