[UPDATE: Discord has issued the following update: "The database is healthy again and our internal error rate has fallen to nominal levels. We are beginning to raise the login rate limit to allow users to reconnect."]
Discord is popular among a wide swathe of gamers. Whether it's just to chat while playing games, playing Dungeons and Dragons with friends, chatting about games within a community, or any number of gaming-unrelated functions, outages here impact a huge number of people. Indeed, a Discord outage can have a huge impact on plans for the day, perhaps moreso than a PSN or Xbox Live outage, because of how many people it connects on a daily basis.
Outages are rare, but unfortunately, it happens from time to time. Discord users have begun reporting that the service was down on January 26, with the platform eventually confirming there was an outage. It was down for about twenty minutes, reported as a "partial outage" on Discord's status page, but it has been upgraded to a major outage.
The Discord team is aware and is looking into it, so users will have to sit tight and wait for it to get sorted. According to the Discord Status Page, the API is what is suffering the major outage. This is responsible for sending/receiving messages, as well as connecting to the overall servers. This last update, as of this writing, indicates that the underlying issue for the API outage has been found, but the team is having to deal with a secondary issue with a database cluster. The entire on-call response team for Discord is currently responding to the issue.
The situation developed over time, with the status page offering constant looks into the fixes. Discord provided constant updates throughout the outage, providing a nice layer of transparency for users. Eventually, as the team moved to fix the issue, it revealed users who were on during the outage could likely connect, and more were being let in slowly as Discord worked to restore the experience. Overall, between the initial discovery, the upgrade to major outage, and the influx of updates from Discord, the worst of this outage has lasted roughly 1 hour.
Usually, outages like these don't last long, so fans should keep an eye on their personal Discord functionality or the Discord Status Page until more is confirmed.