February 19, 2026 A wave of backlash over Discord’s upcoming global age verification rollout is driving users toward rival platforms like TeamSpeak. This week, TeamSpeak revealed the migration has been so large that its infrastructure is struggling to keep up, with servers hitting capacity in multiple regions.

In a post on X, the company confirmed that hosting limits had been reached in parts of the United States and elsewhere, attributing the strain to a surge of new users joining communities and spinning up servers. TeamSpeak says it is racing to expand infrastructure as the unexpected influx continues.

Driving the shift is Discord’s plan to introduce stricter age assurance measures worldwide in March. This includes facial scans or government ID checks for users who want full access to certain features. The move follows regulatory pressure tied to the U.K.’s Online Safety Act but is now being applied more broadly, triggering concern among privacy-conscious users.

The issue for critics isn’t just compliance but trust. A previous breach involving third-party verification tools exposed age verification documents tied to tens of thousands of users. The scrutiny regarding the rollout is made worse by Discord’s choice of age-verification vendor, Persona. A major investor in the age verification provider is Peter Thiel’s Palantir, a company known for providing digital surveillance and private information to the government. Considering Palantir has reportedly provided data support to the U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement and the Israeli Ministry of Defence in the past, many users find it concerning that they will be required to hand over biometric facial data to a connected company. U.K. users are also not comfortable handing over their data to companies in a different country. 

Civil liberties groups have warned that biometric checks risk normalizing identity verification across the open internet, especially if alternatives remain limited. Hence, many are calling for options of multiple age verification providers and perhaps non-biometric verification alternatives.

There is also a call for full transparency over the processing of the biometric data collected and how it is used. 

Amid all these, TeamSpeak, long seen as a niche voice platform popular in gaming circles, is positioning itself as a privacy-first alternative. In the company’s own words, it is a “privacy-first voice and chat platform” that’s “decentralized and secure.”