As people around the world are encouraged to stay indoors and are looking for ways to occupy themselves, services like the gaming chat app Discord have been dealing with an unprecedented number of users. Discord has invested in server improvements to manage the tide, but it looks like that’s not enough – Discord’s servers are currently down for many users.
“We’ve increased capacity world-wide by more than 20% to ensure that you’re able to text, video, and voice chat smoothly,” Discord tweeted, a short time before the outages began. “Many of you are looking to Discord to communicate with loved ones and colleagues at this time, and we will continue to monitor and scale to keep that happening.”
The company later tweeted “Okay we jinxed ourselves. Team is aware of the connection issues and are working on it.” On the official status site, the company said “a series of fatal errors caused the majority of servers to become unavailable.” Users are gradually being let back into servers, and Discord is describing this as a “partial outage.”
Discord has expanded its feature set during the coronavirus outbreak, increasing the limit on Go Live streaming and screen sharing “while it’s most critically needed.”
We've increased capacity world-wide by more than 20% to ensure that you're able to text, video & voice chat smoothly.
Many of you are looking to Discord to communicate with loved ones and colleagues at this time, and we will continue to monitor and scale to keep that happening. https://t.co/Db1xiq1SwQ
— Discord (@discordapp) March 16, 2020
Steam reached a record 20 million users over the weekend, and it looks like plenty of people are taking advantage of digital options to stay occupied during the current outbreak.