Discord mistakenly banned more than 8,000 people for posting nets and other “benign” images

Stanislav Vishnevsky, Discord co-founder and CTO, Writes that the bug It affected about 200 users who posted “grid-like” images, as well as about 8,000 people who posted “other benign images” since May 2026. “All those affected have now been unblocked,” says Vishnevsky.

in Topic on XDiscord wrote that its security system is designed to flag content by “matching it to known malicious material.” Discord explains that this system can produce “false positives,” when an employee steps in to review flagged content. But instead of just temporarily blocking the account from uploading content during the review, a glitch led to its system banning users entirely.

“When our staff reviewed and cleared those accounts, the same error prevented the ban from being lifted automatically, so it remained in place,” Discord says.