Some Nintendo Switch 2 users report overheating, leading to crashes

The Nintendo Switch 2 has been out for less than a month, but people are starting to report some tricky hardware problems they're having.

Multiple Switch 2 players online, seemingly mostly in Japan but also elsewhere, have reported instances of their consoles overheating, per Nintendo Soup and Tom's Hardware. While some users are merely saying their Switch 2 became too warm to comfortably hold in handheld mode, others are reporting full-on game freezes or crashes as a result of overheating, even in docked mode. It should be noted that the Switch 2 dock has an extra cooling fan on it to theoretically prevent this sort of thing.

Apparently, it's happening across a broad range of games, from more intensive titles like Cyberpunk 2077 to last-gen titles like Pokemon Scarlet and Violet.

Nintendo's suggestions are to make sure the air vents are clear and/or move the system to a cooler area, but it remains to be seen if that's enough to alleviate the issue for everyone. If not, users may need to send their Switch 2 units in for repair. I've had a Switch 2 since launch and have played a good amount of it in both docked and handheld mode, and I haven't encountered this issue at all, for what that's worth.

Still, my experience with Switch 2 hasn't been perfect. The Ethernet port on my dock recently stopped working, again, less than a month after launch. No console launch is without issue, and Nintendo's latest seems to be relatively smooth compared to others, but there are still problems to look out for.