Over the past week, users have reported being banned for posting "benign images" with grids, like chessboards, Minecraft inventories and game textures.

Discord co-founder and chief technology officer Stanislav Vishnevskiy wrote on X: "I want to apologize for a bug we fixed that over the weekend wrongly banned ~200 users over grid-like images, and ~8,000 more since May over other benign images.

"Everyone affected has now been unbanned."

He directed people to a support thread on the main Discord account on X, which went into more detail about the situation and how it has been resolved.

The Discord team wrote: "Our systems flag content by matching it against known harmful material.

"This kind of similarity matching can produce false positives, which is why a member of our Trust [and] Safety team always reviews flagged content before any action is taken.

"The intended behavior is to temporarily pause uploads during that review, not ban the account."

However, the bug "caused the latter" to happen, while also presenting the ban "from being lifted automatically, so it just stayed in place", even after the human staff had "reviewed and cleared those accounts".

They added: "Around 8,200 accounts were affected from May 2026 through last week, plus the 200 more this past weekend. We've unbanned everyone affected by this bug."

The team also acknowledged that for those whose accounts have been affected, "that's not a satisfying explanation", and the team "should have caught this sooner".

They continued: "We're working on better safeguards so this can't quietly happen again, and more broadly, on making sure our safety systems don't penalize people who did nothing wrong."

Meanwhile, anyone still struggling with issues has been encouraged to contact the support team.

They said: "If something still feels off with your account, reply here."