Over the weekend, Bungie disabled destiny 2‘s in-game text chat across all platforms after trolls discovered a way to use it to crash other players’ games. Now, the chat still remains off and Bungie hasn’t provided an ETA for when it will return.
On Saturday, I hopped online to play some destiny 2 and was hit with a small message telling me in-game text chat had been temporarily disabled across all platforms. I didn’t think much of it as I primarily play on Xbox Series X and don’t really use text chat. But it turns out that a nasty and simple exploit had been discovered in Bungie’s online sci-fi shooter and to avoid players abusing it, Bungie disabled text chat completely.
The exploit, if done properly, allows a troll to crash someone else’s game (or their own game) by simply entering a specific string of text. An example of this can be seen in a video clip uploaded on July 30 by destiny 2 player ritz. (It should be noted the text seen in the video isn’t the entirety of what’s needed to cause the exploit to trigger.)
why does this exist pic.twitter.com/mra9ByPW6c
— ritz (@ritzzcar) July 30, 2022
According to some reports, players were experiencing crashes when playing online in multiplayer, as those areas have public text chat and were vulnerable to this particular exploit. Shortly after its discovery, players began sharing clips of the exploit and reporting it online, leading to Bungie swiftly disabling all text chat in destiny 2 on all platforms. Bungie confirmed this on his Twitter account on July 30.
“We have temporarily disabled text chat on all platforms in destiny 2 while we investigate an issue causing Weasel errors,” tweeted Bungie. “Stay tuned for updates.”
Bungie has a hotfix planned to go live tomorrow following some maintenance today, but there’s been no confirmation from the devs on if this exploit is being fixed in this upcoming patch. Kotaku has reached out to Bungie about the exploit and if it has any updates on when players can expect a fix and for text chat to be turned back on.