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Discord accidentally banned over 8,000 people for posting grids and other ‘benign’ images
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Discord accidentally banned over 8,000 people for posting grids and other ‘benign’ images
Some users were banned from Discord after posting chessboards, game textures, and Minecraft inventories.
Some users were banned from Discord after posting chessboards, game textures, and Minecraft inventories.
by Emma Roth
Emma Roth
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Jul 7, 2026, 3:02 PM UTC
A Reddit users says they were banned on Discord after uploading this picture of a chessboard.
Image: u/Laskof via Reddit
Emma Roth
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is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.
Discord says a bug affecting its safety system caused it to mistakenly ban more than 8,000 accounts since May. The platform’s statement follows a wave of reports from users over the past week, who say they’ve been banned for posting images containing grids, such aschessboards, game textures, and even Minecraft inventories.
Stanislav Vishnevskiy, Discord cofounder and chief technology officer, writes that the bug impacted around 200 users who posted “grid-like” pictures, in addition to about 8,000 people who posted “other benign images” since May 2026. “Everyone affected has now been unbanned,” Vishnevskiy says.
In a thread on X, Discord writes that its safety system is designed to flag content by “matching it against known harmful material.” This system can produce “false positives,” Discord explains, which is when an employee would step in to review the flagged content. But instead of just temporarily preventing the account from uploading content during the review, a glitch led its system to ban users entirely.
“When our staff reviewed and cleared those accounts, the same bug prevented the ban from being lifted automatically, so it just stayed in place,” Discord says.
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