Thousands of users of the popular chat platform Discord have been greeted with a menacing "Sorry, you have been blocked" message.
Discord, founded in 2015, is estimated to have 150 million users worldwide as of September and is hugely popular in the video game community.
The platform has an interface that is visually similar to workplace apps like Slack or Microsoft Teams, and its web of thousands of group chats or “Discords” allows users to discuss almost any topic imaginable.
These messages aren’t down to a glut of users suddenly being banned for platform guidelines violations, but rather it seems to be a technical issue on Discord’s part.
We are aware of an issue preventing users from accessing the app. Our team is on the case and investigating the issue! 🔎
— Discord Support (@discord_support) September 29, 2023
Check our status page for more updates: https://t.co/ypt16TArbX pic.twitter.com/knuHoCbK0S
Discord’s engineers have yet to be able to get to the bottom of the issue, but they are currently investigating the problem according to the company’s social media, which they have attributed to ”unusual traffic spikes”.
Several tech-savvy Reddit users have connected the attack to an outage in the city of Doha, Kuwait, where cloud hosting giant Cloudflare is performing routine maintenance on one of their large datacentres, which may be causing knock-on issues for other companies Cloudflare works with, though this connection is currently unconfirmed.
As per the popular web monitoring service Down Detector, so far over 44,000 users have reported experiencing some issues with the platform, from all corners of the world including the Middle East and South America.
All hope is not lost, some Discord users online have reported that simply restarting the Discord web app does the trick and gets it to work again.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen an alleged Cloudflare-related outage impact major websites, in June 2022 an outage at the cloud hosting service resulted in downtime for hugely popular services such as Shopify, Gitlab, Telegram, Grindr, Twitch, Coinbase, Fitbit, and Peloton.
