So Your Discord Account Is Banned?

To the question, “Can I get banned on Discord?” there’s a simple, six-word answer. That answer is, “Yes, you absolutely and positively can.”

Discord, like all other instant messaging platforms, is not a public utility. It’s a privately-held company that provides its users with a service. And if it sees users doing spammy or dodgy things, it can ban them.

And it very often does. As reported by Jonathan Bolding for PC Gamer magazine, Discord banned a whopping 55,573,411 accounts from January to June 2022. If the numbers for the rest of 2022 are similar, this makes more than 110 million accounts per year — or about as much as the population of Mexico. Ay ay ay!

If you happen to be one of them, as you probably are since you’re here reading this, let’s talk about the things you need to know and your options.

How to Tell If Your Discord Account Is Banned

First, you need to determine what happened.

Did you get kicked from a server, banned from a server, or banned from Discord, the platform?

Ban	Scope	Description
Server Kick	Server only	You’re no longer part of the server, but can re-join with a new invite.
Server Ban	Server only	You’re no longer part of the server, and you can’t rejoin unless the ban is removed.
Platform Ban	Whole of Discord	You can no longer use Discord from this user account and/or IP address.

Unless you get a kick out of getting kicked and banned, neither of these things sounds particularly pleasant. So let’s go through your options.

Server kick: If a server admin kicked you from their Discord server, you will no longer be able to see or reply to messages on that server. You can join again, but you’ll need a new invitation.

Server ban: If a server admin banned you from their Discord server, you won’t be able to join that server again. Unless they — or somebody else on the server with the same privileges — remove the ban.

Platform ban: If you were signed out of your Discord account and can’t sign in again, then you probably got banned from Discord, the platform. Check your email inbox for a notification message from the Discord Trust & Safety team informing you that you got banned and why.

The thing to keep in mind here is that server kicks and server bans don’t come from Discord; they come from the admins and mods of the server. Whereas platform bans come from Discord.

When you get kicked or banned from a server, you probably broke one of that server’s rules by sharing forbidden content or behaving in a way that others found unacceptable.

When you get banned from Discord, the platform, this means you somehow violated their Community Guidelines or Terms of Use.

What to Do When Your Discord Account Gets Banned

If you get kicked or banned from a Discord server, get in touch with an admin or moderator to find out why and discuss if you can rejoin.

If you get banned from Discord, you can try to write to abuse@discordapp.com to ask what happened and appeal to have your account reactivated. Keep in mind that there are anecdotal stories on the Internet that this doesn’t always work.

To keep using Discord, provided you didn’t break any rules and your account was collateral damage in a bot/spammer sweep, you would need to:

1. Uninstall Discord. Completely remove the Discord app from your computer and/or phone, deleting any folders it may have left behind in the system.
2. Get a new IP from a VPN. Sign up for a trial of a VPN service, which changes your IP address with another through a virtual private network, and see if you can use their available IP addresses to access Discord (with some, you can, with others — not).
3. Create a new account. This one’s easy. With the new IP address, create a new Discord account. You will need a different email address and, if you want to link a phone number (that’s optional), a different phone from the account that got banned.
4. Don’t use Discord without the VPN. A Discord ban may include your IP address, and if the platform detects that a banned IP address is using the app from a second account, it may block that second account, too.

Some VPNs even allow you to buy a dedicated IP address so you don’t browse the web from the same pool of IPs as all of their other users.

What If You Get Banned Again?

Get your Discord account banned once, and it may have been an accident (even though that’s very rare). But get a second account ban, and there’s no way you — or somebody on the same IP address — isn’t doing something spammy or dodgy.

Familiarize yourself with Discord’s community guidelines and service terms, be polite and respectful to all other users, and use the platform as intended. As long as you do, chances are you won’t have any issues.