A jailbreak for the Nintendo Switch 2 may no longer need any outside software to get started, if Discord messages attributed to its creator hold up.
Sammy Hajhamid, who goes by pepsipu online, released a working jailbreak called ns2jb for the console just days ago. It exploited a flaw in SmileBASIC 4, an old game-creation tool that originally shipped on the first Switch. Nintendo responded by yanking SmileBASIC 4 from the eShop, which should have cut off the easiest path to running the exploit.
It may not have mattered for long. According to messages Hajhamid posted on Discord, since picked up by OneJailbreak and discussed on Reddit and reported by Notebookcheck, the developer has ported the jailbreak into WebKit, the browser engine that underpins the Switch 2's limited web access. Nintendo doesn't hand players a standalone browser, but the console can render certain web content, and that's reportedly enough of an opening to trigger the exploit without touching SmileBASIC at all.
That would remove Nintendo's easiest countermeasure. Pulling a game from the eShop stops new jailbreak attempts cold if the exploit lives inside that game. An exploit living in the browser engine instead is a lot harder to kill with a storefront delisting.
Firmware is another matter. The WebKit version is reportedly confirmed working on firmware 23.0.1, and Hajhamid is said to be looking for people running older firmware versions to test it further. None of this has been independently verified beyond the Discord messages and the outlets relaying them, and there's no public release yet. It's also worth being precise about what this actually unlocks.
This still isn't a full jailbreak in the sense longtime modders would recognize. There's no kernel access here, which means no persistent custom firmware, the kind that survives a reboot and lets a console run unsigned code indefinitely. Instead, anyone using this method would reportedly have to re-run the exploit every time they restart their Switch 2, a console that currently runs $800 on Amazon in the US.
Still, that's a meaningfully lower bar than the SmileBASIC route, which depended on a piece of software Nintendo had already moved to kill. A browser-based trigger means the jailbreak doesn't live or die with any single app's presence in the eShop.
Nintendo has a long history of shutting these doors fast once they're public. A firmware update could patch the underlying WebKit vulnerability the same way it's patched exploits on past consoles, and there's no indication yet of when, or whether, Hajhamid plans to release this version widely. For now it's a developer testing with a small circle on Discord, not something the broader homebrew community can download and run. Whether that changes depends on how much runway Nintendo gives it before the next firmware push closes the gap.
GDFiled by The Games Desk
Consoles, handhelds, PC gaming and the platforms and hardware behind them.
More from this desk →
Be the first to comment
Join the argument. No password, just your email or a passkey.