India, May 9 -- Thousands of users across the US reported problems accessing Discord on Friday as the popular messaging platform experienced a widespread outage tied to API and connectivity issues. According to outage-tracking site Downdetector, reports surged to nearly 38,000 shortly before 4 PM ET, with complaints beginning to spike around 2:45 PM ET. The largest concentration of reports appeared to come from major cities including New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle.

Discord acknowledged the problems earlier in the day, saying at 12:08 PM Pacific time that it was investigating errors preventing some users from connecting to the app. After identifying the issue, the company later shared an update at 1:16 PM Pacific st...