Teamspeak server down as Turkish & Russians migrate after Discord ban

Russia and Türkiye are joining the laundry list of countries that ban Discord, the popular messaging platform, leaving users no choice but to migrate to alternatives like Teamspeak.

According to Russian news agency TASS, the ban stems from concerns over the app’s use for unlawful activities, including the spread of extremist content and recruitment for terrorism. Russia—a country with an estimated 40 million Discord users—has now added it to the growing list of restricted American tech platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and X.

As for Türkiye, the country’s authority has blocked the platform due to concerns over content related to child abuse and obscenity. The decision comes amid public outrage following a recent murder case involving a 19-year-old man who killed two women in Fatih, Istanbul, where Discord users were reportedly praising the crime.

“We are determined to protect our youth and children, the assurance of our future, from harmful publications that constitute a crime on social media and the internet,” says Y?lmaz Tunç, Türkiye’s Minister of Justice, on X.

Since then, Discord hasn’t been accessible for good in these two territories (or crashed, at least), and people have been migrating to other platforms. Teamspeak, one of the alternatives, and its servers have reportedly been experiencing outages in recent hours at the time of publishing, which isn’t too coincidental following the ban.

Russian Downdetector reported an outage starting around 2 PM in Moscow time on October 8 with a peak around 7.45 PM. People have also been complaining about the same issue on Reddit and other social media.