Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Twitch, the live-streaming behemoth, is down for a lot of people right now. More users than ever have been tuning in since the COVID-19 pandemic sent everyone indoors; it’s tough to say whether today’s outage is because of server strain or something else entirely.
For its part, Twitch says it’s looking into the problem.
We are investigating an issue that is causing the site not to load properly. We will update you when we know more.
— Twitch Support (@TwitchSupport) March 30, 2020
Right now, when I try to load the site’s homepage, I don’t see anything in the front-page carousel, and the only things that are loading are the left navigation bar where your live followed channels live, along with recommendations for channels you might like, and Twitch’s most popular categories. It’s not yet clear whether you’ll be able to start a stream. That said: individual channels that were already live appear to be loading and streaming normally, and for some users, full service has been restored.
There’s no word yet on when the site will return to normal functionality, but we’ll update this piece when we know more.