Update: Slack appears to be working again for some users. At 12:29 p.m. ET, the company said the following:" While the majority of the issues are still ongoing, it appears that some customers may experience improved connectivity to Slack after the update (CTRL/CMD + R)."

Even Slack can catch a Monday case of the Mondays; for many users around the world trying to access their workplace communication tool on the first critical workday of 2021, Slack is broken.

In a status update, Slack says, "You may currently be experiencing issues loading channels or connecting to Slack. Our team is investigating and will follow up as soon as we know more. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause."

The website Down Detector began receiving reports of Slack issues from locations around the world, including New York, London, and Paris, around 9:30 AM EST.

The problems occurred just as many workers were returning from the New Year's vacation break, and Slack has become an essential tool for millions of people working remotely from home as the COVID-19 epidemic continues. A major outage could have a major impact on productivity for those who rely on the messaging app for discussion and collaboration.

Not surprisingly, the Slack outage has spawned some epic memes. Enjoy: