A Fatal Discord Bug That Banned Accounts For No Reason
A huge public disruptcy is breaking out with this fatal bug in the Discord API causing hundreds of Discord accounts to be disabled without proper reason.
What happened?
Aug 27, 2022, around 6pm, hundreds of Tweets started emerging out of nowhere. People were complaining that their accounts were getting disabled, marked as ‘spam’, and they couldn’t log back in. The interesting part is that none of these accounts were actually spamming or doing anything that would trigger Discord to flag their accounts. Except one thing — they changed their profile information.
The Discord client they were using contained a bug which sent 100s of API requests to the Discord API triggering their spam filters and eventually getting their accounts disabled in an instant. This bug is known to be found in Discord Desktop Client, Android, and a few cases of iOS too. Discord on web seemed to be unaffected.
Changing anything about your profile would bring you to a “Something’s going on here” page that would force you to verify through email or phone.
Continuing to change your profile would make your Discord client send more API requests to Discord continuously. These ‘account disable’s were not exactly a minor issue. These were full on IP bans that prevented you from creating further accounts.
Discord’s Response
Discord were aware of the issue 1.5 hours later. For around 86 minutes, Discord users were getting banned left and right without an explanation.
This is the incident report from their status page.
Account Recovery
Another 1.5 hours after Discord were made aware of the issue, Discord claims to have recovered all affected accounts from this mass platform-wide ban.
One can only imagine the horror of “account has been suspended due to suspicious activity” email by Discord. However, just after a few hours, users have started getting more emails from Discord telling them to change their account password. It is recommended protocol and the smart thing to do in situations like this. If you have been a victim of this bug make sure to follow all necessary steps to keep your account safe.
The Good Ending
Discord has not made an official public announcement of this event. This might just remain as yet another incident in Discord Status. It is unclear what exactly the bug was that made the clients send 100s of API requests. Because of the nature of this incident, if you want to add information to this article or want to correct information, feel free to let us know.
That’s all for today, hope you enjoyed today’s article. Make sure to join our official Discord server to discuss further on this topic or suggest new articles!
Originally published at https://netcord.site on August 27, 2022.
