Popular services like Discord and Spotify have had some issues in the past, most recently on March 8. There was concern that this may have been due to issues with DNS caching, essentially the data that is accessible to users. Specifically, Discord relies on Cloudflare for its web infrastructure and data security so that user information can be securely accessed from a server without the worry of attacks or theft of data.
One of the reasons Discord or a similar application may go offline is an inability to access or back-up data (i.e. text messages, photos, videos, and audio files) from a DNS service like Cloudflare. A Cloudflare service interruption error message would indicate that the Discord application on your average user’s computer isn’t able to connect and access your data. A similar outage occurred in July 2020, which was resolved.
One of the concerns around a DNS caching service like Cloudflare being possibly down is that the outage may have been due to a breach or attack trying to take private user data, but it’s important to note that that may not be the case and the 2020 outage was resolved.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince tweeted at the time of the March 8 outage that Cloudflare’s servers are all operational but are seeing drops in traffic for ISPs upstream of them. As of this writing, both Discord and Spotify are back online with no signs of issue.
