Memo: Disney plans to stop using Slack in most units by the end of 2024, after a hacking group leaked 1TB+ of its data, including 44M Slack messages, in July
The company said in a memo that most of its businesses would stop using the tool by the end of this year
Context & Ripple Effects
Disney's planned exit follows the July leak of more than 1TB of company data, including roughly 44 million Slack messages. It turns a security incident into a broad workplace-software decision rather than a narrow remediation step.
The move echoes an earlier Microsoft policy restricting Slack and other external tools over security concerns, while Slack itself had previously reset passwords after new information about its 2015 breach. The immediate significance is that collaboration platforms can become repositories for a company's operational and creative information.
First-order effects
- Disney’s affected units must move internal conversations and associated workflows off Slack by year-end, creating a near-term migration and continuity task.
- Slack loses use across most Disney businesses after an incident that exposed the risks of retaining a large internal-message archive.
Second-order effects
- Enterprise buyers evaluating collaboration tools may put greater weight on message retention, access controls, and incident response—not just daily product features.
- Competing workplace-software providers have an opening to pursue displaced Disney teams, while Slack must address the trust implications of a high-profile customer departure.
Third-order effects
- If large media and IP-heavy organizations respond similarly to breaches, collaboration software will increasingly be governed as sensitive information infrastructure, with security architecture and data governance shaping vendor selection.
- The pattern could favor customers that can move workloads between collaboration systems and avoid concentrating durable internal records in a single service; the corpus does not establish which platform Disney will adopt.
The trend: A breach-driven reassessment of workplace collaboration tools is making trust, retention, and portability central to enterprise software buying.