Discord fully restored its services on Friday morning following a multi-hour outage triggered by what the company described as “unusual traffic spikes.” The disruption, which began around 6 AM ET/3 AM PT, left thousands of users unable to access the platform, according to reports from Downdetector.
The Impact of the Traffic Surge
During the peak of the incident, the company’s status page officially acknowledged the instability. Discord stated that the influx of traffic resulted in temporary blocks for many users, forcing the engineering team to work rapidly on mitigation strategies to restore normal operations.
Frustrated users flooded social media platforms to report widespread access issues. Many encountered a “Sorry, you have been blocked” error message upon attempting to log in, while those who managed to bypass the authentication wall found themselves unable to load or send messages.
Cloudflare Identifies Root Cause
Cloudflare, which provides infrastructure support, investigated the incident and provided clarity on why legitimate Discord traffic was flagged as malicious.
“We’re aware of, and have investigated the issue that impacted Discord traffic. Cloudflare deploys mitigations to protect customers against DDoS attacks—on average we block 140 billion cyber threats every single day,” the company explained in an official statement. “In this specific instance, legitimate traffic was caught up in Cloudflare filters. From there we disabled these filters and rolled back mitigations, which has stopped the impact. Cloudflare has confirmed that no other users were caught up in these mitigations.”
Update 09/29/2023 12 PM ET/9 AM PT: The article was updated to note that the issues have been resolved.
