Discord's Broken Safety Layer: Permanent Bans Trapped 8,000 Users for Two Months

A bug in Discord's automated moderation system issued permanent account bans instead of temporary holds on flagged content, then blocked the reversal process even after human review cleared the accounts. Over 8,000 users were locked out since May 2026, roughly 200 for posting grid-format images. All have now been unbanned. The failure exposed a critical gap: when the human review layer meant to catch false positives breaks down, users lose account access and community history with no appeal mechanism.