I just asked around how long Freenode (minused Libera since it's a baby basically) has avoided a complete outage. The answer: since it's inception, 20+ years ago.
Thought it was my connection for a sec, then decided to check the status page just in case -- lo and behold! Tried to post the same link here just a minute ago haha.
Update - We are continuing to work through some issues with one of our database clusters. We are still rate limiting login traffic. Next update in 15 minutes.
Jan 26, 12:21 PST
Update - We have instituted a rate limit on logins to manage the traffic load. Users who are logged in are successfully using Discord at this point, and we will be slowly raising the limits here to allow more users in as we can. We expect this to be resolved in the next 15 minutes.
Jan 26, 12:07 PST
Identified - We have identified the underlying issue with the API outage but are dealing with a secondary issue on one of our database clusters. We have our entire on-call response team online and responding to the issue.
Jan 26, 12:03 PST
Investigating - We are currently investigating a widespread API outage.
Jan 26, 11:49 PST
* Revolt - FOSS and self-hostable, still a long time before reaching feature parity https://github.com/revoltchat
* Guilded.gg - closed source alternative https://www.guilded.gg/