Discord, Valorant briefly go offline following Cloudflare network issue

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Web infrastructure company Cloudflare acknowledged issues with its service on Friday afternoon.

(Image credit: Discord)

Update (7/18): Cloudflare says the outage was caused by a "configuration error" and lasted 27 minutes. For the curious, the company breaks down what happened in a blog post, and says it has taken steps to prevent the error from reoccurring. It also stresses that the outage "was not caused by an attack or breach of any kind." 

Update (7/17): At 2:46 pm Pacific, Cloudflare said that it had identified the issue and is fixing it. 

Shortly before that, at 2:36 pm, Discord said that "users are beginning to be able to connect," and that it was recovering from the issue. It later added that it was observing "some impact to calls and DMs due to the large number of users reconnecting."

I can now connect to both Discord and Valorant. In all likelihood, the affected services will recover throughout the afternoon, but we'll continue to monitor the situation in case anything major struggles to come back online. 

It wasn't just Discord and Riot having problems: Ironically, downdetector.com, a site used to check if another website is offline for everyone or just from your connection, was itself down. 

According to game streaming service Parsec, they lost service due to an outage at web infrastructure and security company Cloudflare. Discord also relies on Cloudflare, and acknowledged an "upstream internet issue." Riot acknowledged "server outages."

Cloudflare quickly said it was investigating issues with its network. "Customers using Cloudflare services in certain regions are impacted as requests might fail and/or errors may be displayed," the company wrote. 

Tyler Wilde
Tyler Wilde
Editor-in-Chief, US

Tyler grew up in Silicon Valley during the '80s and '90s, playing games like Zork and Arkanoid on early PCs. He was later captivated by Myst, SimCity, Civilization, Command & Conquer, all the shooters they call "boomer shooters" now, and PS1 classic Bushido Blade (that's right: he had Bleem!). Tyler joined PC Gamer in 2011, and today he's focused on the site's news coverage. His hobbies include amateur boxing and adding to his 1,200-plus hours in Rocket League.