# Sharding

> Splitting a bot across multiple gateway connections, each handling a subset of guilds. Discord requires sharding once a bot passes roughly 2,500 guilds on a single connection.

- Canonical: https://discordtools.blog/glossary/sharding
- Group: Platform
- See also: https://discordtools.blog/glossary/gateway, https://discordtools.blog/glossary/guild
- Updated: 2026-08-31
- Publication: The Index, an independent site not affiliated with Discord Inc.

---
Each shard owns a deterministic slice of the guild set, so an event for a given guild always
arrives on the same shard. Large bots run many shards grouped into clusters across separate
processes or machines.

For a server owner this is invisible until it is not: a partial outage on a large bot usually
means one shard or cluster is down, which is why some servers see a bot as offline while
others do not.