thedisturbed.co

What It Is

The Disturbed is a Slack app for managing on-call rotations in team channels. It defines the current on-duty member as the “Disturbed” person, who is responsible for handling interruptions that arise in the channel—such as issues, internal support requests, or build failures—so other team members can avoid frequent context switching caused by repeated @here notifications.

Core Features

The core workflow is fairly straightforward: first identify the team’s common sources of interruption, then add the relevant members to a roster in a Slack channel, and finally enable the rotation. Once enabled, the channel topic automatically shows the current on-duty person, and the @disturbed bot joins the channel and listens for mentions. When someone asks @disturbed a question, the bot replies in a thread and mentions the current on-duty member. It also provides a set of Slash Commands, including adding/removing members, viewing users, starting or stopping a rotation, resetting the schedule, setting shift start times, overriding future shifts, and linking multiple channels to the same rotation.

Pricing and Integrations

The captured text does not disclose plans, pricing, a free tier, trial information, or payment methods. In terms of integrations, Slack is the only clearly supported platform at the moment. The app can be installed into a Slack workspace and used in public or private channels. There is no mention of integrations with Teams, email, calendars, PagerDuty, or other tools.

Pros and Cons

Its strengths are that the product is highly focused and directly addresses the problem of excessive @here usage and repeated interruptions in busy Slack channels. Setup and daily use are handled entirely inside Slack, so the learning curve is low. Each channel can have its own independent rotation, and multiple channels can also share the same rotation. The downside is that the feature set appears lightweight: the text does not show support for complex on-call policies, escalation rules, auditing, permission controls, security/compliance features, or SLAs. Support information is also limited to a feedback command, with insufficient detail on commercialization or enterprise-grade capabilities.

Who It’s For and Access from China

It is best suited for development teams, platform teams, and internal support teams that rely heavily on Slack and need to rotate responsibility for answering questions and responding to ad hoc incidents. If a team already uses Feishu, WeCom, or DingTalk, it may need to consider local alternatives or build a similar on-call bot in-house. The text does not specify access conditions from China. Since Slack’s usability in mainland China may be affected by network conditions, actual availability should be tested based on the company’s network environment and payment options.