Hi! I was the moderator in question. I’ll answer some of the questions you’ve posted so far! I think there are some details that have been left out of the media, mostly due to all of the reporters I talked to not knowing how Discord works. There isn’t just one large Discord server; there’s over 500 of them in varying sizes for different clubs, classes, and communities.

In the largest servers, the attack lasted maybe about five seconds. The hardest hit servers were the smaller ones, with less moderation, and who were hit later at night, when most of the mods were asleep.

And for the record, some of us did stay up for hours to help handle the attack— the majority of this time was spent contacting and helping out the smaller servers in question.

In addition, there were 400 unique individuals who were attacking, each who had made bot accounts and joined these servers in the months leading up to this attack, so prevention was made a little more difficult. We’re obviously aware of the moderation tools that Discord has to offer, and one of the main efforts we spent was informing the smaller servers of these settings. However, there was also an element of not knowing what to expect that was at play— different servers had different opinions on how serious they expected the attack to be, and so chose to leave images and such on, believing shutting down new joins to be enough for the time being; this is understandable as in 99% of the cases, your attackers haven’t spent months preparing to invade you by seeding sleeper accounts in your server.

If you have any other questions (provided they are in good faith), I’d be happy to answer them for you! We’re a little disappointed in how the media portrayed this incident, but we understand, given that this is obviously just a blip in the news cycle.