Discord hits 45 million users

Two years after its inception, voice and text chat app Discord has announced that it has now reached 45m users.

Mashable reports that concurrent users have hit a peak 4m, with daily active users standing at a massive 8.9m. As of July 2016 Discord had only 11m users, meaning that the rate of growth has greatly accelerated.

200M messages are exchanged every day, with monthly messages reaching 6bn. Around 16 petabytes of voice data is being handled every month. The service also has active users across 231 countries. Its largest server has 77k members.

Furthermore, message numbers are growing by around 22 per cent month on month.

"As Discord grows we are seeing a steady stream of new and growing communities dedicated to specific games and genres, and more people connecting with friends than ever before," CEO and founder Jason Citron said.

"Because of the way Discord was developed — browser-based and therefore requiring no downloading — it is easier for people to jump right in and start playing/talking/connecting."

There’s definite scope for growth, too. Currently Discord requires that users are invited into groups, as there’s no search function.

Discord is the creation of founder Jason Citron, who also created early mobile gaming network OpenFeint, which he eventually sold to Gree in 2011. Having abandoned his mobile MOBA title Fates Forever, he then turned his attention to creating a mobile chat app for multiplayer games.

Discord was initially envisioned as being an aid for mobile gamers, but has since expended to browsers and a dedicated PC app. It has now become the go-to choice for many gamers who wish to reliably communicate with online chums as they game across various platforms.