Popular chat service Discord mostly used by gamers for in-game conversations, experienced issues today due to network problems at Cloudflare and a wider internet issue caused by Verizon. The app was inaccessible for its millions of users, and even Discord’s website and status pages were struggling to load. Discord’s problems could be traced back to problems at occurring Cloudflare, a content delivery network. Cloudflare started experiencing issues at 7:43 AM ET, and this caused Discord, Feedly, Crunchyroll, and many other sites that rely on its services to have partial outages.
Cloudflare said it was working on a “possible route leak” affecting some of its networks, but services like Discord were inaccessible for more than an hour. “Discord is affected by the general internet outage,” said a Discord statement on the company’s status site. “Hang tight. Pet your cats.”
And in a blog post Cloudflare explained the cause of the ‘route leak’ which affected “many internet services” including their own.
They said: “Today at 10:30UTC, the Internet had a small heart attack. A small company in Northern Pennsylvania became a preferred path of many Internet routes through Verizon (AS701), a major Internet transit provider.
“This was the equivalent of Waze routing an entire freeway down a neighborhood street — resulting in many websites on Cloudflare, and many other providers, to be unavailable from large parts of the Internet.
“This should never have happened because Verizon should never have forwarded those routes to the rest of the Internet.”
Cloudflare explained the outage in an additional statement, commenting that “Earlier today, a widespread BGP routing leak affected a number of Internet services and a portion of traffic to Cloudflare. All of Cloudflare’s systems continued to run normally, but traffic wasn’t getting to us for a portion of our domains. At this point, the network outage has been fixed and traffic levels are returning to normal.”