Usually, Overwatch's bugs are pretty harmless—like Ramattra's occasionally wonky Nemesis form—but there have been some game-breaking ones lately. Just a week or two ago, progression systems were completely borked, with Blizzard issuing apology lootboxes and event items to all.
Frustrating as it was, it was nowhere near as game-breaking as yesterday's discovery. Quite literally, in this case, as players discovered that if you spammed the '<' character in text chat, you could roleplay as Sombra and crash everyone's game.
As you can imagine, that's a pretty terrible bug to have in a player's hands, especially in Competitive. Imagine you're winning, and your opponents aren't too happy with that, so they take everyone down with them. In the case of the one and only Frogger, it was actually a teammate yelling "nerf this!" at the start of the match before nuking the entire lobby.
GAME BREAKING OVERWATCH BUG FOR JUST TYPING IN CHAT 😭😭 https://t.co/D3sb1KT1Uv pic.twitter.com/ky4o1azcj6February 26, 2026
Not long after this exploit was discovered, Blizzard disabled text chat to stop unruly players while it worked on a fix. At last, peace. No squabbling in text chat, or discovering all the fun new slurs I can be called by strangers online: "Whoever abused that bug accidentally made OW a safe place," one player wrote. In fact, I imagine it was the perfect time to do your tank placements if you hadn't.
During the text-chat timeout, players were also reporting issues elsewhere, like server instability and being unable to join groups, so it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows.
if you spam <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< in chat you can crash everyones game....... @PlayOverwatch @Blizzard_Ent @BlizzardCS @supertf @pge444 @FBI @NoobHunterOW @xQc pic.twitter.com/tp1WVfYJfPFebruary 25, 2026
Nevertheless, around five hours later, that fix arrived, and text chat is now re-enabled—the gates of Hell are wide open once more. Blizzard has noted that the crash may still occur under certain conditions for the time being, so don't tempt fate.
In all seriousness, it's useful to coordinate with your team, especially in Competitive, so I'm glad Blizzard patched it up in record time. And you can't say it's not funny to crash an entire lobby just by typing a symbol into chat.
