Popular chat service Discord experienced widespread server outages today. The issues started at around 5PM ET, and lasted nearly an hour. Patreon, Deliveroo, GitLab, Zendesk, Medium, and many other sites were also down, and Cloudflare acknowledged issues with its network affected various apps and sites.
“This afternoon we saw an outage across some parts of our network,” explains a Cloudflare spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. “It was not as a result of an attack. It appears a router on our global backbone announced bad routes and caused some portions of the network to not be available.”
Cloudflare quickly detailed its brief issues in a detailed and thorough blog post shortly after the outage. The company noted that it has “never experienced an outage on our backbone” before and responded in less than two hours to get its service fully operational again. “We are sorry for the disruption to our customers and to all the users who were unable to access Internet properties while the outage was happening,” says John Graham-Cumming, CTO of Cloudflare.
Users are currently having trouble disconnecting to Discord due to an upstream internet issue. We’ve got all engineers on deck investigating the issue pic.twitter.com/GvtxKanokl
— Discord (@discord) July 17, 2020
This is the second major outage for Discord this year, after the service was hit with connectivity issues back in March. Discord and other web-based communications services have seen a significant increase in demand and usage since the coronavirus pandemic began, as more and more friends, families, and communities turn to these apps to stay in touch.
Discord was also affected by a Verizon networking issue last year which impacted Cloudflare. Much like this incident, other services were also impacted, and Cloudflare lambasted Verizon for how it handled key internet traffic.
Update, July 18th 6:45AM ET: Article updated with more information from Cloudflare on the outage.