They definitely aren’t channels. They’re more like a namespace. You can have multiple actual channels within a server namespace.

And this design, despite technical SPOF risks, provides a massively better UI/UX than Slack for communities. Honestly discord is the best thing since IRC for non critical communication.

On the developer side they call them "guilds," fortunately. Interestingly it's somewhat common for failures like this to only affect a few guilds at a time (though there are of course catastrophic failures from time to time).

This is probably the biggest discord outage I've experienced in over a year, and I'm definitely not a casual user. Even in this outage it's not been too bad for me, and I can still access most of my chats and servers. I don't deny that it's a SPOF, but Discord is generally reliable and I'm happy with it.

Is it really a SPOF if much of discord was still available? Only my smaller community servers went down, every large server (>1000 people) that I'm in stayed up. Direct calls/chats also still worked.