Slack error token_revoked: Token has been revoked

The token used to be valid and is not anymore. Slack's reference description covers the ways that happens: the token "is for a deleted user or workspace or the app has been removed when using a user token." In practice token_revoked is the error you meet the morning after somebody touched the app: uninstalled it from the workspace, removed it from one workspace of an Enterprise Grid org, rotated its credentials, or deactivated the user whose xoxp- token your integration was quietly depending on.

The crucial property is that revocation is terminal for that token but not for the integration. The app can be reinstalled and a fresh token issued; nothing about your code needs to change. That makes the correct handling very different from a content error: do not retry (every retry will fail identically), do not back off (time fixes nothing), and do not alert as if the code were broken. Record the credential as dead, stop the queues that use it, and route to whatever re-authorization flow you have — for a single-workspace internal app that is usually a human clicking "Reinstall to workspace" under OAuth & Permissions and updating one secret.

A subtle trap for multi-workspace apps: uninstall does not announce itself in your API responses until you next call the API. If you only send messages weekly, you can be revoked for six days without knowing. Slack solves this with events — tokens_revoked tells you which tokens died, and app_uninstalled announces removal — but only if you subscribed to them and your event endpoint is healthy.

In the SDKs this is an ordinary platform error: @slack/web-api rejects with ErrorCode.PlatformError and error.data.error === "token_revoked"; slack_sdk raises SlackApiError with the same string in e.response["error"]. Neither treats it as retryable, and neither should you. Distinguish it from token_expired, which is specific to short-lived tokens under token rotation and is fixed with the refresh token rather than a reinstall, and from account_inactive, where the owning account is gone.

{"ok": false, "error": "token_revoked"}

Treat Slack tokens as revocable at any moment: key every stored credential by team ID, watch tokens_revoked, and build the "reconnect your Slack" path before you need it. For internal apps, document that reinstalling issues a new token and that the deployment secret must be updated in the same change. A revoked token discovered at send time should degrade into a queued re-auth task, not a crash loop — the pattern is covered in Slack bot not responding.