Update (7/18): Cloudflare says the outage was due to a "configuration error" and lasted 27 minutes. The company explained what happened in a blog post and said it has taken steps to prevent the error from happening again. It also emphasized that the outage "was not caused by any attack or breach."

Update (7/17): at 2:46 pm Pacific Time, Cloudflare announced that it had identified the problem and was fixing it.

Shortly before that, at 2:36 p.m., Discord said it was recovering from the problem, stating that "users are starting to be able to connect. It then added that "calls and DMs are being slightly impacted as a large number of users are reconnecting."

I am currently able to connect to both Discord and Valorant. In all likelihood, the affected services will recover throughout the afternoon, but I will continue to monitor the situation in case something bigger struggles to get back online.

Original story (7/17): Friday afternoon, reports began appearing on Twitter from people unable to connect to chat program Discord or Riot Shooter Valorant. At the time, I could not connect to either.

Discord and Riot were not the only ones having problems: ironically, downdetector.com is the site used to check if other websites are offline.

According to Parsec, a game streaming service, web infrastructure and security company Cloudflare experienced a failure and lost service; Discord also relies on Cloudflare and acknowledged "upstream Internet issues." Riot admitted to a "server outage."

Steam does not appear to be affected.

Cloudflare quickly stated that it was investigating problems with its network. The company wrote: "Customers using Cloudflare's services in certain regions are affected as their requests may fail or display errors."