Discord resolves widespread outage caused by ‘unusual traffic spikes’ | TechCrunch

Discord has come back online after an hours-long outage, the instant messaging service confirmed on Friday morning. The company said the outage was due to the platform experiencing “unusual traffic spikes.” The issues began at around 6 AM ET/3 AM PT, according to third-party web monitoring service Downdetector.

“We’re experiencing unusual traffic spikes that lead to users being temporary blocked and we’re working on mitigating this issue,” the company’s status page read this morning.

Users had taken to social media to report that they were unable to log into the service, noting that they were seeing a “Sorry, you have been blocked” message. Those who were able to log in reported that they were unable to see their messages.

Cloudflare addressed the outage in a statement, nothing that it investigated the issue.

“We’re aware of, and have investigated the issue that impacted Discord traffic. Cloudflare deploys mitigations to protect customers against DDoS attacks—on average we block 140 billion cyber threats every single day,” the company said in a statement. “In this specific instance, legitimate traffic was caught up in Cloudflare filters. From there we disabled these filters and rolled back mitigations, which has stopped the impact. Cloudflare has confirmed that no other users were caught up in these mitigations.”

Update 09/29/2023 12 PM ET/9 AM PT: The article was updated to note that the issues have been resolved.