Disney Is Ditching Slack After 44 Million Messages Were Leaked, Spilling Company Secrets Disney has decided to stop Slacking while employees weigh a possible move to Microsoft Teams.
By Sherin Shibu Edited by Melissa Malamut
Key Takeaways
- Disney is moving away from Slack on a company-wide level after a data breach this summer.
- According to the memo, unspecified "collaboration tools" will replace Slack completely by the second quarter of 2025.
- A hacking group called NullBulge released over 44 million messages, 18,800 spreadsheets, and 13,000 PDFs from Disney's Slack channels in July.
After a massive leak of financial and strategy data this summer through Slack, Disney has decided it's more of a Microsoft Teams player.
An internal memo obtained by Business Insider on Thursday confirms that Disney is moving away from Slack on a company-wide level. Most Disney employees will transition off of Slack by the end of the first quarter of fiscal year 2025, ending in late December 2024. All of them will move off of the messaging platform by the second quarter of 2025.
The Walt Disney logo. Photo Credit: RONDA CHURCHILL/AFP via Getty Images
According to the memo, unspecified "collaboration tools" will replace Slack. Disney employees have already begun weighing in on a possible move to Microsoft Teams, with one employee writing, "Teams is horrible."
Disney's decision to stop Slacking follows the leak of over a terabyte of sensitive company data earlier this summer. According to the Wall Street Journal, a hacking group called NullBulge released over 44 million Slack messages, 18,800 spreadsheets, and 13,000 PDFs specific to Disney's strategy, finances, and operations.
The data included Disney's plans for AI-powered recommendations, internal dashboards tracking theme park revenue, and passport numbers for Disney cruise line employees.
Related: Here's How Disney Plans to Use AI to Grow a $16 Billion Business
NullBulge claimed to have been able to obtain every message and file from close to 10,000 Disney Slack channels with the help of one Disney insider. It also says its motivations are to protect artists' rights and promote fair compensation.
Hen Amartely, product marketing director of cybersecurity company Do Control, wrote that organizations can learn from Disney's data breach by keeping sensitive information, especially secrets like account credentials, out of Slack. Amartely also recommends watching out for unusual activity and behavior from insiders.
Disney isn't the first to have internal Slack messages leaked. Uber had an incident in September 2022 as well as Twitter, now X, in July 2020 that started with the hacker gaining entry to the company's servers by first infiltrating a Slack account.
Related: Disney's Internal Slack Message Data Leaked in Latest Hack Targeting a Major Company
