Discord is down. The popular messaging and gaming platform is experiencing a widespread outage on Friday, leaving over 170,000 users unable to log in, send messages or start sessions.
Reports of issues began surfacing around 2:42 p.m. Eastern Time, according to outage tracking site Downdetector. The numbers climbed fast. By 1:19 p.m. PT, more than 95,000 users had already submitted reports. That figure crossed 150,000 shortly after, before peaking at over 170,000.
Most users reporting problems say they are experiencing issues on the mobile application. Others say the platform is either failing to load at all or connecting so slowly it becomes unusable. Attempting to access Discord via a web browser returns an error screen that simply reads: "Something went wrong!"
Discord's official status page confirmed the outage at 12:08 p.m. PT, saying it was "investigating errors in our API systems." About 16 minutes later, the company provided an update identifying the root cause. By 12:56 p.m. PT, Discord said "many users are unable to start their sessions."
"We are continuing to work to remediate the issues impacting availability for some Discord users," the company said in a statement on its status page. "This is causing impact across our service, including logging in and sending messages."
As of 4:21 p.m. ET, Discord said it was "seeing significant recovery" and was metering in traffic as users reconnect. The outage, however, has not been fully resolved.
The company has not disclosed what caused the API errors.
Discord has nearly 260 million monthly active users worldwide and more than double that number in registered accounts. Around 37 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 34 actively use the platform, making Friday's outage one that hit a large and vocal user base hard. Users took to X and Reddit almost immediately to report the issues, with the hashtag Discord down trending within the first hour.
This is not an isolated incident. Discord's own incident history shows a pattern of disruptions in recent weeks. On April 28, connection delays tied to large servers being unavailable took nearly two hours to resolve. On May 2, message delivery on certain channels was disrupted for around 30 minutes. Over the past 90 days, the platform has recorded 27 incidents, 12 of which were classified as major outages, with a median resolution time of 49 minutes.
Despite maintaining a 99.81 percent uptime rating for its API over that same period, the frequency of recent disruptions has not gone unnoticed by users.
Friday's outage marks the second major API incident in a single day. A previous episode began at 7:12 p.m. UTC and lasted over an hour before appearing to stabilise, only for a second wave to hit at 8:22 p.m. UTC.
All other Discord components, including Voice, Gateway, Push Notifications, and client apps across Desktop, iOS, Android and Web, are currently listed as operational. This suggests the disruption is rooted in the platform's backend session and authentication layer rather than a broader infrastructure failure.
Users can monitor live updates at discordstatus.com. The platform has not yet issued a full resolution notice.