Discord API Outage

Today, just before noon PT, the group chat network Discord had a widespread API outage. That means if you’re a gamer, crypto dude, or just someone who enjoys Discord, you won’t be able to post a picture of your dog on the #pets channel of your podcast’s server (or upload and view anything, for that matter). Because some startups, like Slack, use Discord (…primarily in a particular industry where costs are also down, if you catch my drift…), a brief downtime might have ramifications and/or result in a snow day for all employees at an a16z-backed startup.

Discord Responds

“We’ve figured out what’s causing the API outage, but we’re dealing with a secondary problem on one of our database clusters.” The platform stated, “We have our whole on-call response staff online and responding to the issue.” Discord responded by imposing a rate limit on logins to manage demand as its staff worked to resolve the server problem.

Discord stated its database is healthy again 45 minutes after the site went down and is slowly enabling users to reconnect, although you might not be able to log in straight away and will likely get an error message.

Discord announced two hours after the initial disruption that all rate constraints had been eliminated and that the platform was largely back to normal.

“Some Discord servers may continue to experience difficulty connecting with bots using slash commands throughout the following hour.” We wanted to lessen the strain on our databases as part of fixing the situation, therefore we turned off some portions of our slash command system,” Discord noted on its status page. “We’ll finish our internal postmortem process to dig in and figure out what occurred here, but we sincerely apologize if you were unable to login today or experienced other issues.”