Nintendo just banned a ton of Switch 2 consoles, turning them into offline-only bricks

The Nintendo Switch 2 is the fastest-selling console of all time, and it might be tough to get your hands on one if you didn’t preorder or buy it on release day. What I’m getting at is that it could be hard to replace your Switch 2 if something went wrong and you couldn’t use it anymore.

What could happen to it? I’m not talking about the Switch 2 getting punctured by receipts or dealing with Joy-Con 2 drift right out of the box. The real problem is having Nintendo ban your specific console from connecting to the internet after using the MiG Switch/Flash tool on your new device.

Plenty of users who used the MiG microSD tool discovered that their Switch 2 consoles could no longer connect to the web. A screen displaying error code 2124-4508 appears on the console, informing them that “the use of online services on this console is currently restricted by Nintendo.”

As shown in the video at the end of this post, there’s not much you can do to recover your console. A Switch 2 that loaded a MiG card remains banned even after a factory reset.

You can still play games offline on a banned Switch 2, but that’s not the experience most people are looking for. Playing Mario Kart with friends is one of the highlights of the Switch 2. You also won’t be able to buy content from Nintendo’s online store or export your game save data.

If you reset to factory settings, like YouTuber Scattered Brain did, you’ll lose access to offline games too. In that case, the banned console basically becomes an expensive brick.

It’s still unclear whether Nintendo will eventually lift the ban. The error message says the console is “currently” restricted, but it doesn’t give any timeframe.