Does WordPress remove draft status automatically?

Question

Last week our marketing team placed around 35 posts inside of draft due to some legal issues in our market. This week the same marketing team has reported that WordPress has somehow Published these posts automatically and taken them outside of draft status?

Could some code, module, cron or something do this?

Answer 1

Just by itself WordPress will not change the post status. However, if you have a plugin like Draft Scheduler installed, drafts will be published automatically, possibly with some interval. So, you should check your plugins on this type of activity.

Another possibility would be that a backup of the database has been installed after a crash, but you would probably have noticed that.