Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
This is our Monday show, where we dig into the weekend and take a peek at the week that is to come.
We’ll talk more about Wednesday, but this is Y Combinator Demo Day week, so expect a deluge of startup news.
On the podcast today we dug into the latest news from Discord that indicates it is moving towards opening its gates for advertisements.
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Discord is back online after an outage this morning, the company confirmed to TechCrunch.
The outage came as Meta’s Instagram, Facebook and Threads all went down this morning.
YouTube has also confirmed that its service is having issues this morning too, and that it’s working on a fix.
Users reported that they were unable to load messages, while others say said they were unable to access the service at all.
Update 05/05/2024 11:45 AM ET: The article has been updated to reflect that Discord has solved the issue and is back online.
Over the weekend, hackers targeted federated social networks like Mastodon to carry out ongoing spam attacks that were organized on Discord, and conducted using Discord applications.
But Discord has yet to remove the server where the attacks are facilitated, and Mastodon community leaders have been unable to reach anyone at the company.
She told TechCrunch that while Discord has mechanisms for reporting individual users or messages, it lacks a clear way to report whole servers.
And as Smith notes, these mass spam attacks can drive up server costs, leaving admins with unexpected bills.
According to reports on Mastodon, this fully-automated attack was sparked by a conflict between teenagers on two different Japanese language Discord servers.
Discord has become a mainstay for many online communities in recent years, but its relative success hasn’t shielded the platform from the financial woes plaguing the tech industry.
Like other companies making sweeping cuts to their workforces this week, Discord is laying off 17% of its staff, or about 170 people.
In an internal memo obtained by the Verge, Discord CEO Jason Citron blamed over-hiring — echoing explanations that other tech CEOs have offered for recent layoffs.
“We grew quickly and expanded our workforce even faster, increasing by 5x since 2020,” Citron said in the memo.
Last August, Discord laid off 4% of its staff — nearly 40 employees — as part of a company-wide restructuring.
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