• Thousands of users worldwide are reporting that they are being blocked from accessing Discord.
• The chat platform says that it is aware of an issue affecting its APIs.
• Cloudflare also reported an issue around the same time that could block users access from certain APIs.

*Update: According to an update posted to Discord’s status page, the platform is experiencing “unsual traffic spikes” which have led to users being temporarily blocked. It says it is working on mitigating this issue.

While we have not received confirmation, it does sound like a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which have been springing up quite a bit recently.

*Update 2: All systems are operational as of Monday 2nd October 2023.

Original article follows:

Users of the popular chat platform Discord have descended in their thousands on social media and other parts of the internet looking for answers as to why they are being blocked from accessing the app.

Many are receiving a window that reads “Sorry, you have been blocked. You are unable to access Discord.com” when they try to load the app, as seen in the post below. Posts including the phrase “Discord” have shot up to the top trends on X, with hundreds of thousands of users adding to the conversation.

On DownDetector.com, reports of outages and access errors on Discord began spiking around 11:30 AM CAT. Thousands of users have reported on the outage tracking that they are unable to access the app.

Users who have brought the query to Discord’s social media team are being told to check out its server update page for information, and according to the platform it is seeing increased API errors.

“We are aware of an issue preventing users from accessing the app,” Discord writes in an X update. “Our team is on the case and investigating the issue!”

It seems the API access issue could be stemming from Cloudflare. The company maintains Discord’s servers and blocks access to IPs it deems dangerous. Some users are reporting seeing Cloudflare errors when booting Discord on Chromium browsers.

“Cloudflare is investigating issues with Cloudflare Dashboard and related APIs,” the company’s status page told one user. “Customers using the Dashboard / Cloudflare APIs are impacted as requests might fail and/or errors may be displayed.”

The problem is likely intermittent, as there are users who claim to have been blocked by Discord, only to gain access after a few tries or by reinstalling the app. Either way, it is likely the issue will be resolved sooner rather than later.

This does give a good opportunity to put down the headset, stand up from the desk, go outside and touch some grass.