How to Appear Offline on Discord and What It Actually Does

Discord’s status lets others know whether you’re online, idle, Do Not Disturb (DND), or offline. If someone sees your profile, they’ll know how you’re feeling and what you want to do. The invisible status option allows you to appear offline while still using the app and receiving messages, which is a great way to escape from friends who don’t leave you alone.

Invisible mode isn’t something that many people use, however. Why? Because it’s not always clear what it does, especially in relation to other statuses like DND and closing Discord completely.

Discord has an invisible option, but only for all of Discord

The invisibility option exists as part of the app itself. To toggle it, open up Discord, go to your user menu, and click on the status dropdown. There’s an “invisible” option at the bottom of the menu. You can select it to toggle between visible and invisible modes. Note that invisible mode is applied globally — if you set yourself invisible, all other users will see you as invisible.

When you close the Discord app, your presence automatically disappears. Closing Discord completely removes your status, making you look offline. However, there are exceptions to this rule: if you’re signed in to Discord on another device, then you won’t be considered offline. Additionally, any status you’ve previously set (like DND) doesn’t persist once the app closes.

What about Do Not Disturb?

If you’re in DND mode, you won’t receive push notifications or popups when you have a new message. When you close the app, though, DND gets overridden — meaning that you won’t be considered online. In fact, your status reverts to offline, regardless of what your previous status was.

But wait — isn’t invisible the same thing?

Invisible is kind of like DND, except that your status shows as invisible, rather than just not getting any messages.

You can’t apply invisible selectively to certain people, though. Discord doesn’t offer the ability to set different visibility modes per friend, and that’s a feature request that exists within the support community.

However, there are some caveats here. For instance, some friends may be able to detect when invisible mode is active by looking at the number of times they’ve been pinged. But otherwise, invisible mode works exactly as described above.