Discord
Discord is an instant messaging and VoIP social platform that allows communication through voice calls, video calls, text messaging, and media. Communication can be private or in virtual communities called "servers". A server is a collection of persistent chat rooms and voice channels accessed by invitation links. Discord runs on Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, iPadOS, Linux, and in web browsers.
Discord has about 150 million monthly active users and 19 million weekly active servers. It is primarily used by gamers, but the share of users interested in other topics is growing. Discord is the 30th most visited website in the world, and 22.98% of its traffic comes from the United States. In March 2022, Discord employed 600 people globally.
History
Discord was conceived by Jason Citron, who founded OpenFeint, a social gaming platform for mobile games, and Stanislav Vishnevskiy, who founded Guildwork, another social gaming platform. Citron sold OpenFeint to GREE in 2011 for $104 million, which he used to found Hammer & Chisel, a game development studio, in 2012. Its first product was Fates Forever, released in 2014, which Citron hoped would be the first multiplayer online battle arena game on mobile platforms, but it was not commercially successful.According to Citron, during the development process, he noticed how difficult it was for his team to work out tactics in games like Final Fantasy XIV and League of Legends using available voice over IP software. This led to the development of a chat service with a focus on user friendliness with minimal impact on performance. The name "Discord" was chosen because it "sounds cool and has to do with talking", was easy to say, spell, remember, and was available for trademark and website. In addition, "Discord in the gaming community" was the problem he wished to solve.
To develop Discord, Hammer & Chisel gained additional funding from YouWeb's 9+ business incubator, which had also funded the startup of Hammer & Chisel, and from Benchmark capital and Tencent.
Discord was publicly released in May 2015 under the domain name discordapp.com. According to Citron, it made no moves to target a specific audience, but some gaming-related subreddits quickly began to replace their IRC links with Discord links. Discord became widely used by esports and LAN tournament gamers. The company benefited from relationships with Twitch streamers and subreddit communities for Diablo and World of Warcraft.
In January 2016, Discord raised an additional $20 million in funding, including an investment from WarnerMedia. WarnerMedia was acquired by AT&T in 2018 and WarnerMedia Investment Group shut down in 2019, selling its equity.
In April 2018, Microsoft announced that it would provide Discord support for Xbox Live users, allowing them to link their Discord and Xbox Live accounts so that they could connect with their Xbox Live friends list through Discord.
In December 2018, Discord announced it had raised $150 million in funding at a $2 billion valuation. The round was led by Greenoaks Capital with participation from Firstmark, Tencent, IVP, Index Ventures, and Technology Opportunity Partners.
In June 2020, Discord announced it was shifting focus away from video gaming specifically to a more all-purpose communication and chat client for all functions, revealing its new slogan "Your place to talk", along with a revised website. Among other planned changes was to reduce the number of gaming in-jokes it used within the client, improving the user onboarding experience, and increasing server capacity and reliability. The company announced it had received an additional $100 million in investments to help with these changes.
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. Citron says they are still in talks with several potential buyers, including all major gaming console manufacturers. From this, 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. 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.
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 apparently 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 views count, and no records were broken by the Discord Loot Boxes 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".
Features
Discord is centered around managing communities. Communication tools such as voice and video calls, persistent chat rooms, and integrations with other gamer-focused services along with the general ability to send direct messages and create personal groups are present.Servers
Discord communities are organized into discrete collections of channels called servers. Although they are referred to as servers on the front end, they are called "guilds" in the developer documentation, to distinguish themselves from physical computer servers. Users can create servers for free, manage their public visibility, and create voice channels, text channels, and categories to sort the channels into. Most servers have a limit of 250,000 members, but this limit can be raised if the server owner contacts Discord. Users can also create roles and assign them to server members. Roles can, among other things, determine which channels users have access to, change users’ colors, and designate a server's moderation team. The previously largest known Discord server was Snowsgiving 2021, an official Discord-controlled server made for the 2021 winter holiday season. It reached 1 million members. In 2023, the server for Midjourney reached over 15 million members, making it the largest server on Discord.Since 2017, Discord has allowed game developers and publishers to verify their servers. Verified servers, like verified accounts on social media, have badges to mark them as official. A verified server is moderated by its developers' or publishers' moderation team. Verification was extended in February 2018 to include esports teams and musical artists. By the end of 2017, about 450 servers were verified. In 2023, Discord paused the verification program to perform maintenance. The program has not been reopened as of 2024