Discord experienced a widespread outage Wednesday afternoon, preventing many users from connecting to the communications app. The outage started at around 2:45PM ET and prevented users from joining calls or participating in text chats. “We are currently investigating a widespread API outage and are working to resolve this ASAP,” said the official Discord Twitter account. However, now the issue has been resolved, as the account tweeted “connection should be fully restored now” at 5:19PM ET.

Discord is used widely by the gaming community and currently has 150 million monthly active users. This latest outage appeared to affect most users, with widespread reports of issues even connecting to the service.

In a message in the Discord client, the company said:

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

After the outage ended, a message posted to its status page said, “We have fully removed all rate limits and Discord is almost back to normal.” It also noted that “[o]ver the next hour, some Discord servers may continue to see some issues interacting with bots using slash commands. As part of resolving the incident, we needed to reduce load on our databases and we turned down some parts of our slash command system.”

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.

Update, January 26th 5:35PM ET: Article updated to note outage resolved.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/26/22903170/discord-down-outage-problems