Discord Inc.

In March 2021, Discord announced it had hired its first chief financial officer, former head of finance for Pinterest Tomasz Marcinkowski. An inside source called this one of the first steps for the company toward an initial public offering, though Citron had said earlier in the month that he was not considering taking the company public. Discord doubled its monthly user base to about 140 million in 2020. The same month, Bloomberg News and The Wall Street Journal reported that several companies were looking to purchase Discord, with Microsoft named as the likely lead buyer at a value estimated at $10 billion. Discord ended talks with Microsoft, opting to stay independent. It launched another round of investment in April 2021. Among those investing in the company was Sony Interactive Entertainment, which said it intended to integrate some of Discord's services into the PlayStation Network by 2022.

In May 2021, Discord rebranded its game controller-shaped logo "Clyde" in celebration of its sixth anniversary. It also made the color palette of its branding and user interfaces much more saturated, to be more "bold and playful", and changed its slogan from "your place to talk" to "imagine a place", believing that it would be easier to attach to additional taglines; these changes met with backlash and criticism from Discord users.

In July 2021, Discord acquired Sentropy, an internet moderation company.

Ahead of a funding round in August 2021, Discord had reported $130 million in 2020 revenue, triple that of 2019, and had an estimated valuation of $15 billion. According to Citron, the increased valuation was due to the shift away from "broadcast wide-open social media communication services to more small, intimate places", as well as increased usage during the COVID-19 pandemic. Discord captured users who were leaving Facebook and other platforms due to privacy concerns. The company secured an additional $500 million in investments in September 2021.

In September 2021, Google sent cease and desist notices to the developers of two of the most popular music bots used on Discord—Groovy and Rythm—which were used on an estimated 36 million servers. These bots allowed users to request and play songs in a voice channel, taking the songs from YouTube ad-free. Two weeks later, Discord partnered with YouTube to test a "Watch Together" feature, which allows Discord users to watch YouTube videos together.

Citron posted mockup images of Discord around the proposed Web3 principles with integrated cryptocurrency and non-fungible token support in November 2021, leading to criticism from its user base. Citron later said, "We [...] want to clarify we have no plans to ship it at this time."

The CNIL fined Discord €800,000 in November 2022 for violating the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The violations CNIL found were that the application would continue to run in the background after it was closed and would not disconnect the user from a voice chat, as well as allowing users to create passwords of only six characters.

Recent

In early 2023, Discord was used to publish classified United States documents in one of the most significant intelligence leaks in recent history. The documents, distributed on a Minecraft Discord server as photos, detailed the state of the Russo-Ukrainian war, surveillance of allied and adversarial nations, and cracks in alliances with nations aligned with the United States.

In August 2023, Discord cut 4% of its staff, laying off 40 employees as part of a restructuring effort. On December 5, Discord revamped its mobile app for iOS and Android devices. It added features such as dark mode for OLED screens, voice messages, and new icons.

After a fivefold increase in employees between 2020 and 2024, Discord laid off 17%, or 170 employees, in January 2024.

On April Fools' Day 2024, Discord broke the record for the most viewed YouTube video in 24 hours after the Discord client played the announcement video on loop in the app itself. More than 1.3 billion views were removed two days later when YouTube fixed the view count. No records were broken by the April Fools' Day video.

Citron announced in April 2025 that he was stepping down as Discord's CEO but would remain on the board of directors, with Humam Sakhnini, a former Activision Blizzard executive, becoming CEO. Citron wrote this move was in anticipation of making Discord a publicly traded company.

During the Gen Z protests of 2025, many demonstrations were organized on the platform. In September, Discord was used in the 2025 Nepal protests and to help elect a new prime minister despite being banned in Nepal along with other social media except TikTok. The Moroccan protests at the end of that month also originated on Discord, using the platform for organising and public statements. After the suspect in the assassination of Charlie Kirk earlier that month confessed to the killing on the platform, Sakhnini was called to testify before the United States House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on "the radicalization of online forum users, including instances of open incitement to commit politically motivated acts".

Bloomberg News reported that in mid-January 2026, Discord filed plans in confidence for an initial public offering (IPO), supported by Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan banks.

On May 11, 2026, a new tier of Xbox Game Pass was added to Discord Nitro. Titled "Starter Edition", it includes a limited library of over 50 games from the standard subscription, as well 10 hours of Xbox Cloud Gaming access each month. Xbox also announced perks from Discord Nitro for Xbox Game Pass subscribers, with 250 Discord Orbs each month, 1.2x extra Orbs when completing Discord Quests, and automatically applied Discord Shop discounts being included.

Use by extremist users and groups

Discord gained popularity with the alt-right due to its pseudonymity and privacy. Analyst Keegan Hankes of the Southern Poverty Law Center said, "It's pretty unavoidable to be a leader in this [alt-right] movement without participating in Discord".

Citron said that servers found to be engaged in illegal activity or violations of the terms of service would be shut down, but gave no examples.

After the violent events during the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2017, it was found that Discord had been used to plan and organize the white nationalist rally. This included participation by Richard Spencer and Andrew Anglin, high-level figures in the movement. Discord responded by closing servers that supported the alt-right and far-right and banning users who had participated. Discord's executives condemned "white supremacy" and "neo-Nazism" and said that these groups "are not welcome on Discord". Discord has worked with the Southern Poverty Law Center to identify hateful groups using Discord and ban those groups from the service. Since then, it has shut down several neo-Nazi and alt-right servers, including those operated by neo-Nazi terrorist group Atomwaffen Division, Nordic Resistance Movement, Iron March, and European Domas.

In March 2019, the media collective Unicorn Riot published the contents of a Discord server used by several members of the white nationalist group Identity Evropa who were also members of the United States Armed Forces. Unicorn Riot has since published member lists and contents of several dozen servers connected to alt-right, white supremacist, and other such movements.

In January 2021, two days after the U.S. Capitol attack, Discord deleted the pro-Donald Trump server "The Donald", "due to its overt connection to an online forum used to incite violence, plan an armed insurrection in the United States, and spread harmful misinformation related to 2020 U.S. election fraud" but said there was no evidence the server was used to organize the attack on the Capitol building. The server had been used by former members of the r/The_Donald subreddit, which Reddit had deleted several months earlier.

In January 2022, the British anti-disinformation organization Logically reported that Holocaust denial, neo-Nazism, and other forms of hate speech were flourishing on the Discord and Telegram groups of the German website Disclose.tv.

In May 2022, Payton S. Gendron was named as the suspect in a race-driven mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, that killed ten people. It was reported that Gendron used a private Discord server as a diary for weeks as he prepared for the attack. About 30 minutes before the shooting, he invited several users to view the server and read the messages. The messages were later published on 4chan. Discord told the press that moderators deleted the server shortly after the shooting. The New York state attorney general's office announced an investigation of Discord among other online services in the wake of the shooting to determine whether it had taken enough steps to prevent such content from being broadcast on its services, with which Discord said it would comply.

After the assassination of Charlie Kirk in September 2025, FBI director Kash Patel announced that more than 20 users in a Discord community had been placed under investigation after it was found the alleged shooter, Tyler James Robinson, had posted messages in the group admitting guilt for the attack. Before Robinson's arrest, users in the group had also exchanged messages comparing supposed images of the shooter to Robinson, who joked he was being framed by a doppelgänger. Discord later suspended Robinson's account.

Child grooming and safety

CNN has reported that Discord has had problems with sexual exploitation of children and young teenagers on its platform.

In July 2018, Discord updated its terms of service to ban drawn pornography with underage subjects. Some Discord users subsequently criticized the moderation staff for selectively allowing "cub" content, or underage pornographic furry artwork, under the same guidelines. The staff held that "cub porn" was different from lolicon and shotacon and "allowable as long as it is tagged properly". After numerous complaints from the community, Discord amended its community guidelines in February 2019 to disallow the sexualization of "non-humanoid animals and mythological creatures as long as they appear to be underage", and announced periodic transparency reports to better communicate with users.

In June 2023, NBC News reported that it had identified 35 cases of adults being charged with "kidnapping, grooming, or sexual assault" that involved Discord. It also discovered 165 cases of prosecution for sharing child sexual exploitation material on the platform.

In March 2024, a joint investigation by The Washington Post, Wired, Der Spiegel, and Recorder outlined the extensive child grooming, sexual abuse (including sextortion), and murder conducted by a group known as 764 on Discord. The investigation linked 764 and its associated groups and servers to cases in Germany, United States, and Romania dating to April 2021. Discord's representative said the service filed hundreds of reports and removed over 34,000 accounts associated with the group.

The Brazilian government ordered Discord to block its livestreaming services in the country on August 12, 2026, following the suicide of a 13-year-old girl who had been encouraged to do so by others over a livestream. While those involved were also being charged, Brazil claimed that Discord failed to take appropriate measures under its child safety laws to protect children from such content and would fine the company if it failed to disable livestreaming within three days. Discord said it was cooperating with Brazilian authorities.

Age verification

Around April 2025, Discord began experimenting with age verification on the service for some users, ahead of enforcement periods for online safety laws in the UK (the Online Safety Act 2023) and Australia (the Online Safety Amendment). At this point, the age verification was only used if the user had not yet completed other age verification steps within the Discord app, and if they either access or attempt to change content settings to view explicit content. The process either required a face scan, which Discord claimed never left the user's device and used in-app tools developed by third parties to determine the user's age, or through scanning of a government-issued identification, which was reviewed by a third-party company. The age verification was mandated for all British users by July 2025 to comply with the law. While the Online Safety Amendment in Australia ultimately discounted communication services like Discord from enforcing age restrictions, Discord still opted to require all Australian users to use age verification in December 2025 as the law came into enforcement.

Discord announced that it would implement global age verification in March 2026, similar to the methods used in the UK and Australia. All existing accounts will be marked as "teen" by default, until the user completes the age verification step, either through a face scan or a government-issued ID. An age inference model would use AI-powered tools to analyze existing users based on their profile, usage, and gaming history to determine if they are adults, to verify them automatically. Teen accounts would not be able to join servers or channels marked as adult, while existing accounts will not be able to see the contents of these servers until verifying their age. Discord will review servers not already marked as adult using AI tools and some human review to determine if they should be marked as adult servers.

Many users stated they would leave Discord due to the policy, citing concerns surrounding the September 2025 breach. Other concerns were raised about the AI not being able to correctly guess the user's age, comparing the age-verification to Roblox's own age-verification system being bypassed by minors using computer-generated images, or the AI generally failing to guess the user's age, even without the use of computer-generated images. In response to the negative feedback, Discord stated that they expect "the vast majority of people" will be marked appropriately by its age inference model and will never be asked for age verification, clarifying that verification would only be required when the inference model fails to make a clear determination in the user's age. Other concerns were raised by certain third-party vendors that were involved in the age verification process. For some UK users, their face scan or government ID scan would be processed by Persona, a company that has received funding from Peter Thiel, and leave their information with Persona for up to seven days. Due to user backlash to the use of Persona, Discord stated they had terminated its testing with Persona.

Around a week after announcing the plans for age verification, Discord said they would delay the global rollout until the second half of 2026 to address user concerns, but will continue to implement this for countries where it is legally required. Among changes to their plan will be allowing the use of credit cards for verification, providing transparency on the list of partners they will use of these checks, and allowing servers to remain at a teen rating with exemptions for "spoiler" channels that will require age verification to view.

Multiple U.S. states have sued Discord; the state of Texas sued Discord in May 2026 over its failure to prevent exposure of minors to sexual exploitation and extremist content, required by the state's SCOPE Act. In July 2026, the judge issued an order that Discord had 90 days to implement the same protections for minors it had set up in the UK for Texas users.

Discord affirmed it would be rolling out age verifcation during the last weeks of September 2026. The updated system will use contextual information such as account age and activity to determine the user's age, with Discord estimating that 90% of the users will be tagged under this. Where this system fails to positively identify the user's age, only then the user will be asked to use a third-party age verification service.

On September 25, 2026, users on X responded to a post by Discord acknowledging issues with age verification rollout by posting art depicting violence against Discord's mascot, Wumpus.

Bans

On January 27, 2021, Discord banned the r/WallStreetBets server during the GameStop short squeeze, citing "hateful and discriminatory content", which users found contentious. The next day, Discord allowed another server to be created and began assisting with moderation on it.

Censorship

In September 2024, according to Russian media Kommersant, Russian regulator Roskomnadzor was planning to block Discord. Roskomnadzor demanded that Discord remove 947 posts containing illegal content and fined it 3.5 million rubles ($37,493). On October 8, Russia officially blocked Discord.

After a decision by the Ankara 1st Criminal Court of Peace, several hours after Russia's block, Turkey blocked Discord over concerns about child abuse and obscene content. The decision was made after two women in Istanbul were murdered by a Discord user who allegedly garnered support for his action from Discord users before dying by suicide on 4 October 2024.

Discord is blocked by the Great Firewall in China. Chinese police interrogate people who make sensitive comments on the platform.

On September 24, 2026, the Philippine Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) confirmed that Discord has been banned in the country after failing to comply to a 24-hour notice ordering the company to set up a Philippine office. The ban was lifted the same day following a meeting between Discord and the Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center (CICC).