i stand by my opinion that "lets create one chat room and invite hundreds of thousands of people into it" is a bad idea regardless of what technology implements the chat room
I love that companies will make it hard to expense a $50 meal but they will gladly let you book an hour meeting with 20 high-paid developers or even let you directly ping 200,000 people which must cost the company many thousands of dollars.
If you want to tell everyone in your company something, you could email them I guess. Is it the fact that it's a "chat room" which means you expect it not to work? What's best, here? SMS? Email? Putting something on the website and making everyone check the website once a day at noon? Tell one in ten people and get them to "pass it on"?
Yes, and he's making the point that it manages to work. And that perhaps your expectation should be the same for a chat client as for an email client. Which may or may not be a valid point.
And without proper mailing-list-moderation, that too can cause email storms. No one blames "the genius who decided to put everyone in one mailing list" when that happens.
The real fail here isn't putting everyone in one channel. The real fail is not using/providing proper admin tools
I'm going to guess you could also break IBM's phone system by attempting to start a conference call with 200K people on it, and destroy their auditorium by putting too many people on the stage.
Although usually only a limited number of people can post to an "announce-list" that goes to everyone in the company. (And if there are company-wide lists that anyone can post to, most users filter those to a folder. I suspect such lists don't scale past a certain point either.)
I respect your opinion, because even if an application could handle 200k users at once was able to be run on a MBP without serious issue, it's still gauche to forcibly invite 200k people in your company to a chat.
Slack is designed for business chat, and many businesses have thousands or more employees. Slack should be able to handle any features it provides, and @everyone is a feature. I don't know how they've implemented things or what the specific issue is, but it should at least have blocks in place that prevent stupid things. Maybe channel sizes should be limited to 1000 people or whatever their testing shows it can handle. Idk.
Software designed for large numbers of people shouldn't go down because one of those people does something stupid.