Since the coronavirus pandemic has led to many being home more often, the social media and chatting app Discord has announced its intent to shift away from just gaming and focus on communities, at the same time as it has been expanding its server capacity. Around 2:15 p.m. PT this afternoon, Discord users noticed the app went down, leading to it trending on Twitter, but as it turns out the issue has been more wide-reaching.
Discord announced the outage on Twitter at 2:18 p.m. and then indicated everything was fully recovered by 3:47 p.m. In its Tweets, the service indicates that the outage came from "upstream network issues," specifically on account of web-based infrastructure and security company Cloudflare. The company's CEO Matthew Prince announced via Twitter that the issue impacted Cloudflare's network came from a faulty router in Atlanta, Georgia, which has since been routed around.
Following a major Twitter Bitcoin scam hack this week that affected figures including former President Barack Obama and Microsoft's Bill Gates, there was concern that the outage affecting Discord and other sites such as Politico, Medium, and Patreon, according to TheWrap, would be something similar. However, Prince confirmed the issue stemmed from problems during a "routine update" rather than an attack, which was confirmed by a Cloudflare spokesperson talking to TheWrap. All aforementioned sites and services are back online as of this writing.
Prince said a blog post with details about the failure, which affected about 50 percent of Cloudflare's traffic for over 20 minutes, will be coming soon. It has not been posted as of this writing. While perhaps not as flashy as the Twitter hack that led to verified accounts being temporarily silenced, according to Deadline today's outage affected at least 12 data centers in intermittent ranges between Los Angeles, California, and Amsterdam.
Discord's connectivity issues as a result of the outage appear to have gotten the most attention on social media, but having outages with particularly gaming-focused services is not an unusual sight. At the end of June, thousands of Steam users indicated the service was down, though that problem was also solved within a day.
Server outages have also affected individual companies in recent months, at least in part because of increased traffic due to the coronavirus pandemic. Nintendo Switch Online had a serious outage in March, for example. Luckily for those who use Discord, Patreon, and other services under the purview of Cloudflare, it seems things have returned to normal quickly.
Sources: Discord, TheWrap, Deadline, Cloudflare Blog