Incident Library

Organisation

Discord

Discord · discord

5 cases · 2017 to 2026

Root cause Software defect2Capacity exhaustion1Cloud provider outage1Configuration change1
Component Coordination and key-value store2Database2Service discovery2In-memory cache1CDN and edge network1Database proxy and connection pooler1Pod termination1
Contributing factor Overlapping failures2Retry storm2Unverified assumption1Automation amplification1Ignored early signal1Unpatched known bug1Unknown limit1Limited debug access1Harmful manual action1Monitoring blind spot1No headroom1Dependence on a warm cache1
Symptom Service outage5High latency2Database overload1Failover failure1High error rate1Memory pressure1Network unreachable1

Cases

  1. IL-0499 Discord voice and video calls hung at Awaiting Endpoint for three hours after 17% of sessions stopped at onceDiscord · 2026

    Root cause Configuration change

  2. IL-0270 Discord's ScyllaDB authentication cluster overloaded during an OS upgrade, and logins failed for about 50 minutesDiscord · 2023

    Root cause Capacity exhaustion

  3. IL-0271 An empty etcd service entry crashed Discord's Elixir chat nodes, and Discord was down for most users for an hourDiscord · 2020 · sev1

    Root cause Software defect

  4. IL-0261 Discord went fully offline twice as short network losses on Google Cloud sessions nodes wedged Erlang distributionDiscord · 2017

    Root cause Cloud provider outage

  5. IL-0388 A Google Cloud live migration took a Discord Redis primary offline, and the failover broke API instances and then guildsDiscord · 2017

    Root cause Software defect