Discord said it is postponing its global age-verification rollout after a wave of user criticism over privacy concerns, pushing the wider expansion to the second half of 2026. In a Feb. 25 blog post, Stanislav Vishnevskiy, Discord’s chief technology officer and co-founder, said the company “missed the mark” with the approach it unveiled earlier this month.
Vishnevskiy said Discord will continue to meet specific legal obligations related to age verification, but that it will change the initial policy before moving forward with a global expansion. The company said it will “complete and expand” alternative verification options before rolling out the revised system more broadly.
The decision followed sharp backlash tied to Discord’s initial plan, announced in early February, that would begin rolling out an age verification process in March. Discord said the March approach would include face scanning and, for users it could not determine were adults, requests for an ID upload.
Discord also faced additional scrutiny after users raised concerns about the security of documents handled through a third-party provider Discord had worked with. In the blog post, Vishnevskiy acknowledged that a prior security incident affecting a provider contributed to skepticism, and he said Discord no longer works with the vendor implicated in that breach.
Vishnevskiy said Discord runs a security and privacy review for every vendor before integration, including contractual limits on data use and strict retention and deletion requirements. He wrote that information submitted for age verification is stored only for the minimum time necessary, and that in most cases it is deleted immediately if a vendor fails the review.
In the blog post, Vishnevskiy said one vendor that “didn’t meet the mark” was Persona, an identity verification service. He said Discord ran a limited test with Persona in the United Kingdom in January, but that Discord could not meet its standard for facial age estimation, which it said requires the estimation to be performed entirely on-device so that biometric data never leaves a user’s phone.
Vishnevskiy also addressed criticism that Persona became the subject of online backlash. Persona’s co-founder and chief executive, Rick Song, said in a statement posted to LinkedIn that Discord’s claims about Persona’s capabilities were not accurate and emphasized that Persona offers on-device age verification. Song wrote that he was not “okay with them publicly saying untrue things about our age assurance technologies” to shift responsibility away from Discord’s own decisions.
Discord’s revised approach, Vishnevskiy said, keeps key safeguards while changing how the company handles the minority of users it cannot determine are adults using account-level signals. Discord said it can proactively determine ages for most users by looking at signals such as how long an account has existed, whether a payment method is on file, the types of servers a user is in, and patterns of account activity.
For users who still need to verify, Discord said it is working to provide options beyond face scanning and ID upload. Vishnevskiy said users who do not verify their age will keep their accounts, including servers, friends list, direct messages, and voice chat, but they will not be able to access age-restricted content and will not be able to change certain default safety settings meant to protect teens.
Discord also said it plans to publish a detailed post explaining how its automatic age determination systems work, and to document every age-verification vendor and their practices on its website.