Slack has finally decided to close down their IRC and XMPP gateways.

True to form, you can only read their announcement if you already have a Slack account and are logged in to a workspace.

Here's the gist of their announcement:

As Slack has evolved over the years, we've built features and capabilities —
like Shared Channels, Threads, and emoji reactions (to name a few) — that the
IRC and XMPP gateways aren't able to handle. Our priority is to provide a
secure and high-quality experience across all platforms, and so the time has
come to close the gateways.

They're of course being economical with the truth here.