Discord's Moderation Bug Left Users Banned After Clearance

Discord's moderation system failed to lift bans even after Trust & Safety reviewers approved reinstated accounts, persisting for roughly two months undetected. The initial flagging worked—it caught benign images like chessboards—but clearance decisions never reached the enforcement layer downstream. The gap signals a missing safeguard: no reconciliation logic existed to verify that approval decisions actually took effect, a standard practice in distributed systems.