Popular workplace messaging service Slack suffered a massive outage late Tuesday evening, leaving users around the world unable to send or receive messages and files.

The service failed around 7 p.m. ET and partially resumed by 9:13 p.m. ET. At that time, the company said some users were able to successfully connect to the messaging app, but cautioned the issue is not yet fully fixed.

Slack tweet: We're hearing reports of successful connections. Things should slowly be returning to normal but we're not fully out of the woods just yet.

At about 9:35 p.m. ET, the company updated its status page, saying all users should be able to use the messaging app again.

The company also apologized for the disruption and thanked users for their patience.

Slack tweet: We're sincerely sorry for the service disruption you're seeing at the moment. We're working on it with top priority.

Slack tweet: It's smooth sailing again. Everyone should be able to connect to Slack. Thank you for your time and patience, we know how precious both are.

Slack has about 9 million weekly active users and is a popular mode of communication among many Silicon Valley firms, Fortune 100 companies and media organizations. On its website, Slack says it has more than 50,000 paying companies that use the service.

The messaging app raised $250 million in a funding round led by Japanese tech giant SoftBank in September. That put the company's overall valuation at $5.1 billion.

Users took to social media to complain about the service disruption. In true internet fashion, the memes and the jokes soon followed:

Rachel Heine: tfw you wanna slack your coworkers a funny tweet about Slack being down, but SLACK IS DOWN!!

Thomas Fuchs: Is IRC still a thing? Where do people go when Slack is down?

Matt Pearce: Whichever newsroom refused to add Slack, like Battlestar Galactica, is going to conquer us all tonight.

Dima Spivak: Slack is down and I don't know how to complain to my coworkers about it.

Matthew Patterson: For remote companies, #slack going down is like