Bungie disables Destiny 2 chat after trolls use it to crash games

Destiny 2’s chat functionality has been offline since Saturday after players found a bug had players crashing each other’s games. Bungie turned off text chat on Saturday, with no word on when it’ll return. Chat is off on all platforms.

“We have temporarily disabled text chat on all platforms in Destiny 2 while we investigate an issue causing Weasel errors,” Bungie wrote. “Stay tuned for updates.”

Destiny Bulletin, a Twitter account dedicated to Destiny 2 news, published a video of the exploit on Saturday. In it, the game crashes after a player enters a string of text into Destiny 2’s text chat box with the whisper function. Until the weekend any place in Destiny 2 with local or team chat was at risk, as some players reportedly used the exploit to crash others’ games in multiplayer.

Destiny 2’s designers have scheduled a maintenance period later Monday in preparation for a hotfix on Tuesday. There’s no word yet if that will fix the text chat exploit. We’ve reached out to Bungie for more information.

Over the past few years, Bungie has made a name for itself as a studio that won’t tolerate bad behavior in its games. Last month, the company sued a Destiny 2 streamer alleged to cheat and harass employees — including a threat to burn down the studio’s headquarters — and it’s not the first lawsuit targeting cheaters and cheatmakers. Due to said harassment, which also comes from people on Reddit and social media, Bungie has scaled back how it communicates with fans; players have reportedly threatened employees and their families.

“The harassment we’ve spoken to isn’t just rude replies on Twitter or vague comments,” Destiny community manager Dylan “dmg04” Gafner said. “There have been real threats towards our people and our studio. We’re taking them seriously, which is leading to an amount of reduced communications as the team plans future protections/strategies to help avoid these sorts of things.”