Discord status

How we check Discord

We watch discord.com/api/v10/gateway from all five of our probe regions, every 2 minutes. A region that sees a failure does not make this page say "down" on its own: a second region has to agree first, the same confirmation rule every YoPingMe monitor uses.

The gateway endpoint tells an unauthenticated client where to open its realtime connection, and it answers plainly without a token, which makes it a clean signal about the part of Discord that everything else depends on. Watching the marketing homepage instead would report a healthy CDN while every client in the world was failing to connect.

What is Discord?

Discord began as a voice and text application for gaming and became the default meeting place for a much wider set of groups, including open source projects, trading communities, university courses, hobby clubs, and a large number of companies that use it as an informal support channel. That drift matters when it goes down, because a service many people still think of as social has quietly become the place where work gets coordinated for a lot of them.

The architecture explains most of what an incident looks like from the outside. Discord is not one connection but several. A persistent gateway connection carries realtime events, a conventional API handles the request-and-response operations, a content network serves images and attachments, and a separate fleet of voice servers, selected by geography, carries audio. Those parts share a brand and very little else, which is why partial failures are the norm rather than the exception. Text arriving normally while voice is unusable is an ordinary Tuesday, not a contradiction, and neither is the reverse.

Geography is the second complication and the one most likely to cause an argument. Because voice regions and gateway endpoints are distributed, two people in the same conversation can have genuinely different experiences at the same moment. One person insisting the service is down while another sees no problem at all is usually both of them being correct. This is also where a single-location status check misleads badly, since it can only ever report what one place saw. Readings from several countries at once turn a disagreement into a diagnosis.

The bot ecosystem adds a failure mode that has nothing to do with Discord's own health. A large community typically runs several bots for moderation, roles, music, or ticketing, and each maintains its own gateway connection subject to its own rate limits. When a bot goes quiet, the community's first assumption is an outage, when the more common cause is that the bot lost its connection and is backing off, or hit a rate limit after a burst of activity. The symptom is identical from the inside, which is why an outside reading of the platform is the quickest way to separate the two.

For anyone running a community that depends on Discord, the practical lesson is the same one that applies to any single platform. A short outage is survivable if there is somewhere else to say so, and painful if Discord is also where you would have posted the announcement about Discord being down.

Frequently asked questions

Is Discord down right now?

Check the board above; it reflects our own probes against Discord's API from all five of our regions, refreshed every couple of minutes. A failure seen in one region is not enough for this page to say down, a second region has to agree first.

Discord is not loading for me but my friends are fine. Is it down?

Probably not, and the per-region readings above are the fastest way to confirm that. Discord routes users through voice and gateway infrastructure that varies by location, so a regional problem genuinely can affect one group of people and not another. If every region above looks healthy, the more likely causes are your local network, a DNS resolver serving a stale answer, or the client itself, which a hard refresh in the browser version will rule out quickly.

Why is voice chat broken when text messages still work?

Because they are separate systems that fail independently. Text messages travel over the gateway and API connection, while voice runs through a network of dedicated voice servers selected by region. It is common for voice in one region to degrade while text everywhere is untouched, which is why changing a server's voice region is a real workaround during an incident rather than superstition.

My bot stopped responding. Is that a Discord outage?

Sometimes, but check your own gateway connection first. A bot that has been disconnected and is failing to reconnect, or one that has been rate limited after a burst of requests, produces exactly the same silence as a platform outage from your users' point of view. If the board above shows the API answering normally, look at your bot's reconnect logs and its most recent rate-limit responses before assuming Discord is at fault.

How is this different from Discord's own status page?

Their page reports what Discord's engineers have confirmed from inside the platform. This page reports what our probes measured from outside it, from five locations, on a fixed schedule whether or not anyone has posted an update. During a live incident the useful move is to read both.