
Discord Is Having an Outage - fooey
https://status.discordapp.com/
======
simias
Pet peeve of mine: as I understand it Discord labels each of its communities
as "servers". That's why you've probably encountered youngins calling
subreddits or group chats "servers" lately. That's obviously a misnomer since
it's not like they're technically independent servers (as showcased by this
crash).

It's just vocabulary but for somebody like me who still hangs onto IRC even
though it's been almost entirely displaced by proprietary and centralized
solutions like Discord it really feels like they're rubbing it in. Just co-
opting decentralized lingo with none of the actual features.

~~~
wgerard
Wait until you see what Discord calls servers internally :) [0]

Jokes aside, I don't think there's anything about the term "server" that
implies independence. I can think of many centralized access points that are
called "servers" but aren't independent. Hell, even racks aren't necessarily
independent.

I get what you're saying, but the term "server" can be pretty vaguely applied.

0:
[https://discordapp.com/developers/docs/resources/guild](https://discordapp.com/developers/docs/resources/guild)

~~~
heymijo
> * I don't think there's anything about the term "server" that implies
> independence.*

Communication is perception.

Simian above, and myself grew up in an era where a server did indeed imply
independence. Counterstrike servers, IRC servers, FTP servers, all independent
things in these contexts.

For others the perception may be different as I assume it is with anyone young
who primarily encounters the word server in their Discord use.

~~~
wgerard
But that's kinda my point: CS servers weren't really independent. If
Valve/Steam/VAC/etc. stopped working, CS servers were all down effectively.

~~~
sho_hn
And yet I'm convinced Discord chose this naming _because_ it implies
independence. It sounds a lot cooler to say "We got our own server" than "We
started our own guild".

~~~
tylerl
Discord replaced ventrillo and teamspeak for gaming communities. For those you
actually ran a "server". Whether or not the company started out calling these
accounts "servers" initially, that customer base sure did. It was the
terminology customers were used to. They neither knew nor cared what the
technical aspects were of having a separate server; it just what you called
that thing that the team used to communicate.

~~~
sho_hn
> For those you actually ran a "server".

Exactly - something difficult to do that not everyone could just do (or rent
from a service, or have permanently running). Which is cool.

I'm saying this is an important element to Discord's early success precisely
because it understood the gamer audience it was engaging, how it communicated
and thought and the tools they were using. Discord allowed people who
previously couldn't to "have a server". Which lead to a period of everyone
"making" one, and then better ones survived. Not the only factor, but it
contributed. I clearly remember how proud people were of their "servers".

I'm sure they knowingly made use of this fact and picked a term that implied
more than it does in technical reality because it had social currency. If you
play to an audience, understanding what it values and what generates status
within it helps a lot.

------
ve55
Is anyone else pretty bothered that popular services like Discord can and do
read all of your 'private' messages in plaintext, and when/if they are bought
out, all of your chat and usage history will be sold to an unknown third party
along with the company?

I wish at some point we'd see _mainstream_ messengers that put actual effort
into respecting the user, along with their autonomy and privacy. It'd be
amazing if we could actually _directly_ (from a technical perspective) message
other people, without needing central servers between us.

~~~
kgraves
WhatsApp? Name one messenger that is not closed source and the masses use.

~~~
drewbug
Email

~~~
kgraves
I agree that the masses use this, but I'm not sure that you can compare email
to WhatsApp, maybe a fair comparison would be _instant_ messengers.

Also open source?, I doubt it.

~~~
contravariant
The protocol is open, even if the most commonly used implementations may not
be.

As for _secure_ , well that's a whole other matter.

------
grezql
microsoft teams failed too today so I reverted back to email. slack had
downtime aswell.

None of these were prepared for the massive surge of users working from home.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
If only we had a decentralized networking protocol.

~~~
MuffinFlavored
What’s a popular decentralized networking protocol that is easily used for
chat? XMPP?

~~~
29083011397778
Depending on how you define popular, Matrix [1] fits here. Mozilla has
switched from IRC to Matrix recently, and there are likely others I've
forgotten or missed.

[1] [https://matrix.org/](https://matrix.org/)

------
chrysoprace
My work set up Discord for voice chat during WFH despite mine and my
colleague's efforts to promote setting up a Matrix server with federation
disabled.

We self-host just about everything else ourselves, but for some reason
everyone flocked to Discord.

~~~
t-writescode
They just want some random company focused on non-corporate secrets to read
all of your channel messages and private messages. It’s fine :)

In seriousness, I suspect if your company wasn’t already using a chat solution
then perhaps they weren’t interested in that.

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sulfastor
It is this related to the increasing number of colleges in France using
discord to give lessons to the students?

~~~
SlowRobotAhead
Doubt it.

The most of USA is going in to two week lock down if you look at schools,
restaurants, a lot of white collar jobs, etc.

What do you think everyone is going to do all day? Every kid in the country is
about to use the internet at the same time.

I think we're going to see a lot of outages over the next two weeks.

------
EamonnMR
Can anyone help me explain the mad rush to make discord servers for
everything? Is it gamified somehow?

~~~
saagarjha
What mad rush are you talking about?

~~~
EamonnMR
In many Reddit communities you'll see "hey community x, here is my new discord
server 'x'"

An extremely niche and obscure (single player) game I follow for example has
four discord servers-about one for every three active posters in the
community!)

------
Hokusai
I also got problems with Safari Books Online around lunch time.

But our Microsoft Teams meeting in the morning worked pretty well. Even that
everyone was calling from home. (That is 10 connections while usually is just
one meeting room and a couple of people from home or another location).

Google Photos search was also stuck for several seconds before getting
results.

In general the web felt slow most of the day. I am not surprised that Discord
service is suffering.

------
dancemethis
Unfortunately it will come back, as all bad things do.

------
agumonkey
soon we'll have to quarantine TCP to avoid congestion

------
josteink
This is what centralized infrastructure does. No surprises there.

In the mean time, my IRC-servers had 100% uptime. Just saying’.

~~~
OskarS
Compared to Discord, how many users does your IRC servers have?

~~~
Lammy
I think that's their point. It isn't a centralized service comparable to
Discord that will be overwhelmed by the entire quarantined world bearing down
on it at once.

------
CORBLIMEY-19

      A series of fatal errors caused the majority of servers to become unavailable. We are working to revive all of these resources. Most users will be unable to connect while this work is ongoing.
    

That's microservices for you. Instead of one fatal error you have to fix
there's multiple in different codebases at the same time

~~~
kyleee
Can you remove the code formatting on that and just use quotations? Very
difficult to read on mobile

~~~
caleb-allen
Here is what it says:

"A series of fatal errors caused the majority of servers to become
unavailable. We are working to revive all of these resources. Most users will
be unable to connect while this work is ongoing."

