Discord is down, it’s not just you

The group chat platform Discord suffered a widespread API issue today, beginning just before noon PT. That means that if you’re a gamer/crypto bro/someone else who just likes Discord, you won’t be able to upload that picture of your dog in the #pets channel of your podcast’s sever (or upload and view anything, for that matter). Since some startups use Discord like Slack (…mostly in a particular industry where prices are also down, if you catch my drift…), a short outage could have repercussions and/or give a snow day to every employee at a startup funded by a16z.

“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,” the platform posted. In response, Discord instituted a rate limit on logins to manage traffic while its team worked to solve the server issue.

About 45 minutes after the site went down, Discord said that its database is healthy again and is slowly allowing users to reconnect, but you might still not be able to log in right away, and will likely see an error message.

Image Credits: Discord

About two hours after the initial outage, Discord posted that they removed all rate limits and that the platform is nearly back to normal.

“Over 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 wrote on its status site. “We are going to complete our internal postmortem process to really dig in and understand exactly what happened here, but we really apologize for the inconvenience if you were unable to login today or had other issues.”

TechCrunch reached out to Discord for comment.

Update, 1/26/22, 2:52 PM PT more information about the outage.