[HN Gopher] Discord Is Having an Outage
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Discord Is Having an Outage
Author : fooey
Score : 62 points
Date : 2020-03-16 21:47 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (status.discordapp.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (status.discordapp.com)
| grezql wrote:
| microsoft 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 wrote:
| If only we had a decentralized networking protocol.
| Fomite wrote:
| Yep - we had two different conference call services, including
| Microsoft Teams, fail today.
| avip wrote:
| I 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.
| CORBLIMEY-19 wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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 wrote:
| Can you remove the code formatting on that and just use
| quotations? Very difficult to read on mobile
| caleb-allen wrote:
| Here 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 wrote:
| That'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 wrote:
| Are 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.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Your 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.
| josteink wrote:
| This is what centralized infrastructure does. No surprises there.
|
| In the mean time, my IRC-servers had 100% uptime. Just saying'.
| OskarS wrote:
| Compared to Discord, how many users does your IRC servers have?
| Lammy wrote:
| I 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_ wrote:
| Not 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 wrote:
| Do you honestly think their server would ever see the same
| load? That's part of centralization vs decentralization -
| different load topology.
| anchpop wrote:
| All 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 [1]:
| https://top.gg/servers/150074202727251969
| Hokusai wrote:
| I 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.
| sulfastor wrote:
| It is this related to the increasing number of colleges in France
| using discord to give lessons to the students?
| kmfrk wrote:
| It'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.
| ve55 wrote:
| Is 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.
| api wrote:
| That's SaaS.
| techslave wrote:
| iMessage isn't mainstream enough for you?
| drewbug wrote:
| isn't it closed-source and centralized?
| rwallace wrote:
| I agree, it's not the most user-friendly of business models. Do
| you know how to make a more user-friendly business model
| profitable enough to appeal to investors?
|
| This is not a rhetorical question. If I knew a way to make a
| more user-friendly service profitable enough to have a
| reasonable shot of gigadollar return on investment (which is
| what it takes to be interesting to venture capitalists), I
| might very well go ahead and put together a YC application, but
| right now, I don't know a way to do that. Do you?
| kgraves wrote:
| I would prefer not having to use VC money to fund such an
| endeavour. This model needs to stop, maybe a change to a
| bootstrapped model + pay to use is the way to go.
| rwallace wrote:
| Okay. I personally do not have the financial reserves to
| bootstrap something like this, though if someone else does,
| I by all means wish them luck.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| I am concerned the Discord might not be financially viable or
| unable to scale to what we need during this unprecedented
| crisis.
| kgraves wrote:
| WhatsApp? Name one messenger that is not closed source and the
| masses use.
| drewbug wrote:
| Email
| kgraves wrote:
| I agree that the masses use this, but I'm not sure that you
| can compare email to WhatsApp, maybe a fair comparison
| would be _instant_ messengers.
|
| Also open source?, I doubt it.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Terrible ergonomics.
|
| The probability that somebody replies with a quote of the
| entire unencrypted thread when attempting to use PGP
| approaches 1 for long email chains. Encrypted email also
| leaks not just metadata but _data_ since you can 't encrypt
| subject headers.
| doorbellguy wrote:
| Signal?[1]
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_%28software%29
| kgraves wrote:
| Disagree, the masses don't use this software, I know nobody
| who uses this. Plus, the technology behind it is already in
| WhatsApp.
|
| Although it is a privacy based, (good for _some_ people) I
| don't see why the masses would use this if WhatsApp is
| there.
| doorbellguy wrote:
| I'm not here to debate you on anecdotal data (I know 5
| people off the top of my head who do use it).
|
| It has a respectable 10,000,000+ installs on the google
| play store and ranks high on the apple store with
| 270,000+ reviews. Though not comparable with the likes of
| WhatsApp (which I personally use and prefer), I would not
| dismiss it as 'not' a mainstream option. We can agree to
| disagree for sure.
| anchpop wrote:
| > It'd be amazing if we could actually directly (from a
| technical perspective) message other people, without needing
| central servers between us.
|
| There is no reason this should not be possible, I'm hoping that
| tools like Dat or IPFS will enable stuff like this to be better
| than the alternatives
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(page generated 2020-03-16 23:00 UTC)