Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Discord is experiencing a widespread outage, preventing many users from connecting to the communications app. The outage started at around 2:45PM ET and prevents users from joining calls or participating in text chats. “We are currently investigating a widespread API outage and are working to resolve this ASAP,” says the official Discord Twitter account.
Discord is used widely by the gaming community and currently has 150 million monthly active users. This latest outage appears to be affecting most users, with widespread reports of issues even connecting to the service. Some Discord users currently logged into the service may be able to continue to use text chat, or participate in calls.
In a message in the Discord client, the company says:
We have identified the underlying issue with the API outage, but are dealing with a secondary issue on one of our database clusters. We have our entire on-call response team online and responding to the issue.
Image: Discord
Discord’s outage message to users.
Discord says it’s now limiting logins “to manage the traffic load,” and that users who are currently logged in should be able to successfully use the service right now. “We will be slowly raising the limits here to allow more users in as we can,” says Discord.
Discord last experienced a brief outage in November, after Google Cloud problems caused issues for the communications app. This latest downtime is marked as a “major outage” on Discord’s status page, and it’s clear it has taken the service fully offline for most users.
Discord has been quietly building its own app platform based on bots over the past few years, and it plans to release a new app discovery feature in the spring. Bots are an important part of the Discord experience, with more than 30 percent of Discord servers utilizing them.
Update, January 26th 3:20PM ET: Article updated with more outage information.