Discord accidentally banned more than 8,000 accounts since May — all because of a bug in its safety system. The company confirmed it after a wave of users reported getting banned for posting completely normal images.
What kind of images? Chessboards. Game textures. Minecraft inventories. Anything with a grid pattern, basically. One Reddit user got banned for uploading a picture of a literal chess board. Another got hit for sharing a game texture. Someone else got the hammer for a Minecraft item trading message.
Here’s what happened. Discord’s safety system is designed to flag content by matching it against known harmful material. Sometimes it produces false positives — that’s normal. An employee is supposed to review the flagged content and clear it. But a glitch caused the system to skip the temporary restriction and go straight to a full ban.
The real kicker: when staff reviewed and cleared those accounts, the same bug prevented the ban from being lifted automatically. So the ban just stayed in place.
Cofounder and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy says about 200 users were hit for posting “grid-like” pictures, with roughly 8,000 more affected by “other benign images.” The good news? Everyone’s been unbanned.
