TeamSpeak’s Servers Overwhelmed By Mass Discord Exodus

People aren’t exactly taking kindly to Discord’s decision to roll out its privacy-invading age verification checks worldwide. In fact, there’s so much frustration with the move that rival voice-chat tech TeamSpeak says its servers have been completely overwhelmed by the exodus of disgruntled Discord users.

As reported by PC Gamer, TeamSpeak has posted to X to warn users that “current hosting capacity has been reached in many regions, especially in the United States,” along with an exploding cat meme. It credits these perhaps welcome technical issues to “the incredible surge of new users joining TeamSpeak and subscribing to communities,” and adds that the company is “working on expanding availability across additional regions.”

TeamSpeak, already big in the Overwatch community, describes itself as a “privacy-first voice and chat platform” that’s “decentralized and secure,” which certainly suggests a different approach to Discord. It’s a less complicated piece of software, but that also means it doesn’t constantly fucking pester you about whatever the bloody hell Nitro is.

Like so many things from history, this is all Britain’s fault. The farcical UK Online Safety Act is forcing all social media platforms and adult-oriented websites to require age verification checks before its citizens can access them, and the result is chaotic nonsense that has the UK government trying to figure out how to stop children using VPNs, while PornHub announced it’s just outright blocking UK users from visiting its site. Aside from that, it’s also made half the internet far more irritating to use, and now Discord—one of the companies most enthusiastic about putting in these verifications—has declared it’ll be rolling the same out to the rest of the world this March.

That’s not gone over very well, not least because—and this really seems too farcical to be true—just a few months back a hack of some third-party software revealed the private age verification documentation of 70,000 users. Those would be documents Discord had told users would not be stored anywhere. Gosh, why ever might people not entirely trust Discord with their passport or ID?

Things somehow became even more ridiculous this weekend when Discord announced it was distancing itself from one of the potential age verification firms after it was proven to be linked to terrifying Antichrist fan and billionaire Peter Thiel, whose Palantir company is all about…digital surveillance and private info-snooping. Perfect.

TeamSpeak is responding by expanding as fast as it can to take advantage of this new interest, opening new regions for community creation.

The company is also rather enjoying some tasty revenge.