Discord outage silences gamers worldwide

Discord, the leading voice chat service used by video gamers around the world, suffered a widespread outage on Wednesday, affecting millions of users for over an hour. Only half of the user base was able to return to the service by 1pm Pacific time [21:00 GMT].

“We are currently investigating a widespread API outage and are working to resolve this ASAP [as soon as possible],” Discord announced shortly before noon Pacific on Wednesday, as the outage site Downdetector showed a massive spike in reports.

The underlying issue was identified within 15 minutes, but resolving it has taken longer. The problem was compounded by “a secondary issue on one of our database clusters,” Discord said. The company responded by limiting the number of log-ins allowed as they worked to restore functionality. 

By 12:30 PST, the database was declared “healthy again” and the login limit was increased.

Deprived of their favorite communication medium, Discord users flocked to Twitter, flooding it with memes while speculating about the real reason behind the outage.

The outage didn’t just affect gamers used to having Discord to coordinate their multiplayer experience, but also people who used the service to socialize.

There were even some reports on social media of relationships adversely affected.

Discord is a free group-chatting platform that boasts around 150 million monthly active users. While it was originally created for gamers and its rise was propelled by the growing popularity of esports, the platform has since gone mainstream, becoming one of the widely used tools for online communication.