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Discord Is Having an Outage
- CORBLIMEY-19 7y agoA 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 7y agoCan you remove the code formatting on that and just use quotations? Very difficult to read on mobile
- caleb-allen 7y agoHere 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."
- raziel2p 7y agoThat's jumping to conclusions very quickly. I could easily say the same thing about a monolithic spaghetti codebase where a change in one place led to unintended consequences somewhere else.
- conradfr 7y agoAre they using microservices though? I think it's Elixir+Rust nifs and go/c++ for media. And we have zero informations on what the problem is.
- hinkley 7y ago"Any sufficiently complicated concurrent program in another language contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Erlang." Akka, Microservices, half of Kubernetes... all are making similar observations and coming to different conclusions and/or battle plans based on the tools near at hand. But it's not like monoliths don't have huge, even bigger problems with action-at-a-distance. The problems that get you are a mix of simple human errors and subtle patterns of side effects that are difficult to spot or predict. Simple errors are easy to fix wherever. Emergent behavior is much harder to cope with.
- t-writescode 7y agoElixir is a language on top of Erlang, if memory serves me, so yes, Erlang is in there :)
- hinkley 7y agoYeah, it is, and it’s at the top of my todo list.
- 1123581321 7y agoYour username made me laugh. :) I haven’t found multiple service architecture to have this issue in a careful, sufficiently large engineering org unless they share vulnerable infrastructure. There should not be any situation where multiple APIs are changing in a backwards-incompatible way simultaneously.
- sulfastor 7y agoIt is this related to the increasing number of colleges in France using discord to give lessons to the students?
- kmfrk 7y agoIt's almost midnight in Europe, so you wouldn't have peak hours around this time. Which is not to say that people using Discord livestreaming for remote taching can't have overloaded it from other geographies.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y agoDoubt 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.
- ve55 7y agoIs 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.
- techslave 7y agoiMessage isn’t mainstream enough for you?
- jfkebwjsbx 7y agoiMessage is not really used outside US.
- drewbug 7y agoisn't it closed-source and centralized?
- chc 7y agoI think that was responding to the call for "mainstream messengers that put actual effort into respecting the user, along with their autonomy and privacy." iMessage is closed-source and centralized, but from what I know of it, it does seem fair to say it doesn't violate people's autonomy or privacy in a significant way.
- throwaway5752 7y agoI am concerned the Discord might not be financially viable or unable to scale to what we need during this unprecedented crisis.
- kgraves 7y agoWhatsApp? Name one messenger that is not closed source and the masses use.
- grezql 7y agomicrosoft 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 7y agoIf only we had a decentralized networking protocol.
- MuffinFlavored 7y agoWhat’s a popular decentralized networking protocol that is easily used for chat? XMPP?
- 29083011397778 7y agoDepending 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/
- sgrove 7y agoNetsplits!
- Fomite 7y agoYep - we had two different conference call services, including Microsoft Teams, fail today.
- avip 7y agoI think the internet as a whole is not fully prepared for this global binge/upload your dancing kids vid event. Not that I care, I've got books.
- josteink 7y agoThis is what centralized infrastructure does. No surprises there. In the mean time, my IRC-servers had 100% uptime. Just saying’.
- OskarS 7y agoCompared to Discord, how many users does your IRC servers have?
- Lammy 7y agoI 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.
- Analemma_ 7y agoNot to be snarky, but did your IRC servers have 100% uptime because no one was using them? These services are all going down because they're seeing huge surges in usage; your servers absolutely would collapse under the same load.
- swsieber 7y agoDo you honestly think their server would ever see the same load? That's part of centralization vs decentralization - different load topology.
- anchpop 7y agoAll the IRC servers in the world couldn't support all the traffic discord gets in a typical day no matter how the load was distributed. According to Wikipedia [0] Freenode has less than 100k users spread across 32 servers. The group of Discord channels (confusingly referred to as a server) for Roblox players has 300k [1]. The Chill Zone server, which doesn't have a topic and where people just chat, has 150k members and over 6 million messages in it's "#general" channel, and the discord server for the /r/teenagers subreddit has 21M in its "#general" channel. These constitute a tiny fraction of the number of text messages being sent over discord, which itself probably uses a tiny amount of bandwidth compared to the constant pictures and files being sent, not to mention the voice and video calls. It's easy to have 100% uptime when you have a product so user-hostile that nobody uses it. Yes, Discord is an electron app that probably spies on you, but users don't really care about that compared to being able to read messages sent when their computer was turned off or getting notifications on their phone, etc. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode [1]: https://top.gg/servers/150074202727251969 https://top.gg/servers/150074202727251969
- Hokusai 7y agoI 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.
- simias 7y agoPet 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.
- anaphor 7y agoIt might be a nod towards the terminology that Erlang/OTP uses, i.e. "gen_server". Discord is built on Elixir IIRC. http://erlang.org/documentation/doc-4.9.1/doc/design_principles/gen_server.html http://erlang.org/documentation/doc-4.9.1/doc/design_princip...
- wgerard 7y agoWait 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
- EamonnMR 7y agoCan anyone help me explain the mad rush to make discord servers for everything? Is it gamified somehow?
- saagarjha 7y agoWhat mad rush are you talking about?
- EamonnMR 7y agoIn 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!)
- chapium 7y agoIts easy to generate links to join a server and offers a large degree of control for the administrator. If you want to establish a community forum quickly with the flexibility to change its structure as the community grows its pretty nice. It has the same draw that the php bbs pages had in the 90's and 00's.
- monadic2 7y agoI’d imagine any current rush is correlated to coronavirus concerns.
- chrysoprace 7y agoMy 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 7y agoThey 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.
- agumonkey 7y agosoon we'll have to quarantine TCP to avoid congestion
- dancemethis 7y agoUnfortunately it will come back, as all bad things do.