Bungie shuts Destiny 2 text chat to stop malicious exploit

Over the weekend, players in the Destiny 2 community started to notice a game-breaking bug that could be activated just by sending in-game chat messages to other players. Bungie responded on Saturday by temporarily disabling all in-game chat while it investigates the issue.

"The team is aware of the exploit right now that is causing some players to be kicked and are actively working on identifying what’s causing the issue and addressing it," Destiny 2 Community Manager Liana Rupert wrote on Twitter just before chat was disabled across the game.

Scrub those inputs

The damaging exploit involved a string over 200 characters long, composed mostly of Chinese characters, according to multiple players who came across it over the weekend (and who shared the forbidden text with Ars Technica). The specific way those Chinese characters are encoded in Unicode means each one can take up more memory space than a single-byte ASCII character.