Microsoft launches a new Audio Dock and Teams presentation remote

The Microsoft Audio Dock is designed to keep your desk clear from cables and remove the need for a microphone headset. | Image: Microsoft

Microsoft is introducing two new Teams-certified accessories to improve hybrid meeting setups: the Microsoft Audio Dock and the Microsoft Presenter Plus remote control.

The Audio Dock is a pill-shaped all-in-one speakerphone system with a passthrough PC charger and four different ports (HDMI, USB-A, and two USB-C) designed to help reduce desktop clutter. You can connect up to two monitors with HDMI and USB-C connections, with the passthrough charger supporting up to 60W of power, which is enough for most modern laptops. It provides dual forward-facing microphones with noise-reduction capabilities, and there’s an integrated mute control atop the device that clearly indicates your microphone status to spare you from any embarrassing...

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AI-generated imagery is the new clip art as Microsoft adds DALL-E to its Office suite

Microsoft Designer will let users type text prompts to generate new images.

Microsoft is adding AI-generated art to its suite of Office software with a new app named Microsoft Designer.

The app functions the same way as AI text-to-image models like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, letting users type prompts to “instantly generate a variety of designs with minimal effort.” Microsoft says Designer can be used to create everything from greeting cards and social media posts to illustrations for PowerPoint presentations and logos for businesses.

Essentially, AI-generated imagery looks set to become the new clip art.

Microsoft is rolling out this software slowly and carefully

The app isn’t ready for a full launch though, and Microsoft is only offering a limited web preview. “We’re inviting people to try it out, give us...

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The Surface Laptop 5 arrives with Thunderbolt 4 but no AMD options

The Surface Laptop 5 now comes with Thunderbolt 4. | Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge

Microsoft is refreshing its Surface Laptop lineup today with new Surface Laptop 5 models. While the company has offered AMD and Intel chip options for the Surface in the past, this year’s models are pure Intel with the addition of Thunderbolt 4 support.

Microsoft hasn’t fully explained why it’s dropped AMD from its Surface Laptop lineup, though. “We focused on shipping Intel 12th Gen,” says Pete Kyriacou, vice president of program management at Microsoft. “We’re great partners with AMD, we continue to work with them on longer term projects but for Laptop 5 we don’t have AMD models.”

Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge

The new Sage color option (right).

As with last year’s Surface Laptop 4 lineup, Microsoft will...

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Surface Pro 9 lets you pick between Intel or Arm 5G and new color options

Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge

Microsoft is combining its Surface Pro X and Surface Pro lines into a single product this year, the Surface Pro 9. After 10 years of the Surface 2-in-1 concept, you’ll now be able to pick between an SQ3 Arm-powered processor with 5G support and Intel’s 12th Gen Core processors. And for the first time, you’ll also be able to pick colors that extend across the entire Surface Pro 9 exterior, not just the Type Cover.

The choice between processors might actually be difficult this year simply because, for the first time, the Surface Pro 9 with SQ3 is the only model with built-in 5G support. Microsoft won’t be offering 5G on its Intel Surface Pro 9 line, so you’ll have to go Arm if you want the mobile connectivity option. That’s been a tradeoff...

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Microsoft’s Surface Studio 2 Plus ships with an RTX 3060 for $4,299

The Surface Studio 2 Plus is all about internal upgrades. | Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge

It’s been a long time since Microsoft updated its Surface Studio line of all-in-one PCs. While rumors had suggested a Surface Studio 3 was on the way, Microsoft is debuting its Surface Studio 2 Plus today instead — an upgrade on the Surface Studio 2 that launched four years ago. It includes some important upgrades on the inside, but the exterior is practically the same, and it all starts at an eye-watering $4,299.

The Surface Studio 2 Plus will ship with Intel’s 11th Gen Core i7-11370H processor, a chip that’s rapidly approaching two years on the market. We’re about to enter Intel’s 13th Gen era, so it’s hugely disappointing to see Microsoft not move to 12th Gen H series chips or wait for Intel’s latest and greatest.

“Our goal was ship...

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Microsoft’s Adaptive Accessories finally have a release date

Microsoft announced its Adaptive Accessories back in May 2022, but now we finally have some additional details. | Image: Microsoft

Microsoft has announced that its range of Adaptive Accessories will be available to purchase starting on October 25th in select markets. The Adaptive Accessories were first announced in May and are designed to address common issues that can prevent people from getting the most out of their PC, especially if they have difficulty using a traditional mouse and keyboard.

The wireless system includes a programmable button, an adaptive mouse, and the Microsoft Adaptive Hub, which connects up to four Microsoft Adaptive Buttons to as many as three devices. The mouse is a small, square-shaped puck that can clip into a palm rest with a removable tail and thumb support. The mouse and button can be customized using a range of modular components,...

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Cyberpunk 2077 Stadia saves can be carried over to PC, but you’ll have to use Takeout

If you want to transfer your save, you’ll need to do it before Stadia shuts down in January. | Image: CD Projekt Red

Cyberpunk 2077 players who played the game on Stadia can transfer their save files to PC before Google’s cloud gaming service shuts down, but it’s a little convoluted. To get the files, you have to use Google Takeout, which lets you download your data from Google services and manually bring them over to your PC.

CD Projekt Red has a newly updated support document detailing how it works. Although there are a few steps involved, if you want to carry your progress over, you should do it as soon as you can. Once Stadia shuts down for good on January 18th, 2023, you won’t be able to retrieve that save, CD Projekt Red’s global PR director Radek Grabowski confirmed to The Verge, meaning your progress will be lost forever.

One bonus to bringing...

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Nvidia promises big DirectX 12 performance gains in latest drivers

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Nvidia says its latest GeForce GPU driver will include some significant performance gains for games like Cyberpunk 2077, Forza Horizon 5, and many other DirectX 12 titles. Some of the performance improvements are double digit percentage increases in frame rates, across 1080p, 1440p, and 4K.

Cyberpunk 2077 will see up to 20 percent improvements at 1080p, with Assassin’s Creed Valhalla jumping by up to 25 percent at the same resolution. Even Control will see improvements at 4K, of up to 6 percent.

“These improvements include shader compilation optimization, reduced CPU overhead, and Resizable BAR profiles for Forza Horizon 5 and F1 22,” explains Nvidia in a blog post today. “Many of these optimizations are most beneficial in CPU-bound...

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Roku launches range of smart home products with partners Wyze and Walmart

Roku’s Indoor Camera SE. | Image: Roku

Roku has officially announced a lineup of smart home gadgets that includes lighting, plugs, and cameras. The devices, which were “developed in partnership” with the budget-friendly smart home company Wyze, will be sold exclusively through Walmart in the US starting on October 17th. According to Roku, the initial lineup includes smart bulbs (with white and color versions), light strips, indoor and outdoor smart plugs, a video doorbell, a floodlight camera, indoor and outdoor cameras, and an indoor camera that can pan and tilt “to view an entire room.”

Unlike Roku’s existing hardware lineup of streaming boxes, wireless speakers, and soundbars, these new smart home gadgets go beyond directly improving video and audio. At launch, users will...

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Cybersecurity Week 2022

Illustration by Vincent Kilbride / The Verge

The biggest vulnerability is always the human element.

It’s a truism in the security world, but we rarely dwell on what it means. You can patch a software flaw completely, but there’s no perfect fix for an accounts payable clerk who approves a phony invoice or an executive who falls for a spear-phishing attack. Human beings are complex, and keeping them safe is even more complex. It’s the hardest problem in security; in a sense, it’s the only problem.

So for the next two weeks, we’re taking a look at some cybersecurity stories with the human element at the center, whether it’s scammers dangling bogus job offers or people facing the difficult choice of who to trust when seeking an abortion. These difficult situations are at the heart of...

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How to password-protect your PDFs

Vincent Kilbride / The Verge

One of the reasons PDFs are so popular, especially among lawyers and other legal professionals, is that they are accurate and (for the most part) unalterable versions of documents that were once only available on paper. As a result, because PDFs often hold information that we want to keep private, they can also be password-protected.

There are a variety of ways you can password-protect a PDF file. If you use a Mac, you can use the Preview app that comes with macOS. If you use a Windows PC, it’s a little more involved; you can use the Word app (assuming you’ve got a paid-for version), or you can use an online app by Adobe (the company that created the format).

Here are step-by-step directions to help you protect your PDFs with one of...

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After Roe, abortion collectives along the US-Mexico border are at greater risk

Illustration by Vincent Kilbride / The Verge

Olivia* wanted to terminate her pregnancy. Having an abortion in Arizona, where she lives, was not an option. After the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, clinics there paused since the law was unclear. Olivia went online to look for options and found a hotline, some funding services, and clinics’ locations, yet she still did not feel that she had a solution. Until she saw Las Borders on Facebook.

Las Borders, a three-member feminist collective born in 2017 in the northern Mexican state of Baja California, guides pregnant people on how to safely use medical abortion and accompanies them throughout the process. Co-founder Perla Martínez responded to Olivia’s message and explained how to have a safe medication-induced...

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Microsoft Teams can soon be set as default on Cisco conferencing hardware

Cisco’s Room Bar (pictured) will be among the first of its devices to be Teams certified. | Image: Cisco

Cisco’s video conferencing hardware will be updated to let users set Microsoft Teams as the default video conferencing software, the two companies have announced. Initially six devices will be certified to work with Teams in the first half of next year, including the Cisco Room Bar (a combined speaker and webcam), the 55 and 75-inch versions of the Cisco Board Pro (a freestanding screen designed for video conferencing) and the Cisco Room Kit Pro.

Cisco’s press release stresses that its own Webex video calling software (which it paid billions for a little over a decade ago) isn’t going anywhere. “The devices will continue to support joining Webex meetings with all the features and functionality customers enjoy today,” the release notes....

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Intel reportedly planning major layoffs, likely affecting thousands of jobs

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Intel is planning substantial job cuts, likely numbering in the thousands, according to a report from Bloomberg News. The reduction in headcount is a response to declining demand for the company’s consumer chips — part of a wider downturn in the PC market.

The layoffs will hit Intel’s sales and marketing teams particularly hard, says Bloomberg, affecting around 20 percent of team members. The cuts will reportedly be announced “as early as this month,” around the same time as Intel’s third-quarter earnings report on October 27th. The company currently has 113,700 employees.

After two years of booming sales during the pandemic, the PC market is now struggling. Recent analysis from Gartner found that worldwide shipments totaled 68 million...

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Burnt Hair musk, by Elon, now for sale

The Boring Company is selling a Burnt Hair fragrance for $100 a bottle. | Image: The Boring Company

Ever fancied smelling like scorched keratin? Weird, but you’re the target demographic for Elon Musk’s latest product innovation: Burnt Hair cologne. Yes, you can buy it.

The fragrance is the realization of a tweet Musk made back in September and is being sold through Musk’s The Boring Company, which you might recall has sold other novelty items in the past, such as the Not-A-Flamethrower. The advertising imagery shows a red bottle with a ruby-like gemstone on top. It’s not the most imaginative design if you’ve grown up with cheap, celebrity-endorsed perfumes, but then a receptacle for the scent of burnt follicles doesn’t deserve to be elegant.

10,000 bottles of Burnt Hair sold!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 12, 2022

At $100, Burnt...

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The best headphone deals from Amazon’s Prime Early Access Sale

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

It’s Prime Day 2022 — yes, again — at Amazon, and the company is offering a ton of hard-to-resist deals on headphones and earbuds from Apple, Beats, Sony, Google, Bose, and more. The Prime Early Access Sale is happening now through tomorrow, October 12th.

Whether you’re looking for a new pair of noise-canceling headphones, trying to save on something from our best wireless earbuds list, or just hoping to buy some inexpensive buds, Amazon’s got all the bases covered. And the discounts you’re seeing now could be a good indicator of what prices to expect for Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the coming weeks.

The best deals on noise-canceling headphones and earbuds

• Google’s Pixel Buds Pro, by far the company’s best earbuds to date, are on...

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BMW uses QR codes and your phone to control casual games on its big in-car screen

AirConsole running on BMW’s latest curved display. | Image: BMW

BMW is the latest automaker trying to get gaming to happen on vehicle infotainment screens while you’re charging or otherwise waiting around in your car. The company plans to add AirConsole, a party game service that normally runs on devices like Android TV or PC, into cars equipped with the curved infotainment display at the heart of its iDrive 8 system.

AirConsole delivers games over the internet, with controls handled by smartphones instead of dedicated controllers. The library of over 180 games available on the PC version aren’t exactly heavy hitters, like GoKart Go Air, Mega Monster Party, and Let’s Cook Together, which seem heavily inspired by Diddy Kong Racing, Mario Party, and Cooking Mama, respectively. Absent are any...

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The best deals from Walmart’s competing Prime Day event

Walmart also has plenty of deals to cash in on today | Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge

Amazon isn’t the only one with deals on Prime Day. If you’re looking for alternatives to shopping at Amazon, Walmart is currently featuring many of the same deals, like the Apple Watch Series 8, the SteelSeries Arctis Prime gaming headset, and the second-generation Google Nest Hub. We’ll continue to update this roundup with more deals as they become available, but you can always check out our collection of the best Amazon Prime Early Access deals for an overview of what’s available.

• The 41mm configuration of the GPS-enabled Apple Watch Series 8 is currently discounted to $349 (normally $399) in its silver, red, or black colorways. The 45mm model is also available for $379 (normally $429) in its red, starlight, or silver colorways. Read...

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The best smart plug deals from Amazon’s fall Prime Day event

Smart plugs are handy gadgets that can help automate older appliances. | Image: iHome

Smart plugs are a simple and inexpensive way to automate gadgets around your home that may be a little older or weren’t built with home automation in mind — just plug them into an available outlet and use their corresponding app to link them with your home network. Beyond just allowing you to toggle the power for a specific outlet using virtual assistants like Amazon Alexa, models like the iHome Flow Smart Plug are capable of monitoring the power usage of specific devices over time if you’re looking for ways to conserve energy.

Here, we’ve gathered a number of smart outlets that are currently discounted as part of Amazon’s Prime Early Access Sale (and competing sales elsewhere). If you’re looking for a broader picture of what discounts...

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The best Prime Early Access deals on Amazon devices

Amazon’s latest ad-supported Kindle Paperwhite is on sale right now for $99.99 instead of $139.99. | Photo by Chaim Gartenberg / The Verge

If you missed out on the steep discounts we saw on Amazon devices during Prime Day, it appears you have another chance. That’s because many of the same deals we saw in July are currently resurfacing in the run-up to Amazon’s Prime Early Access Sale (aka, Prime Day 2.0).

What’s more, Amazon’s current discounts are some of the steepest we’ve seen this year, which isn’t all that surprising given Amazon recently announced a slate of new devices during its fall hardware event. That makes now a good time to snag an older Echo Show model, the last-gen Echo Dot, or even Amazon’s latest Kindle Paperwhite.

Like with our Prime Day coverage, we’ve curated a list of the best discounts available on Amazon devices ahead of Amazon’s Prime Early Access...

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Honda’s bringing a $4.4 billion EV battery plant to Ohio

Photo by Vlad Savov / The Verge

Honda first announced plans to partner with LG Chem to build a $4.4 billion electric vehicle (EV) battery plant back in August, and the two companies confirmed today that the factory’s coming to Fayette County, Ohio. Establishing a US-based EV plant will allow Honda’s upcoming line of plug-in vehicles to qualify for the country’s EV tax credits.

Construction on the factory will begin early next year, with mass production of EV batteries set to start by the end of 2025. Honda says the factory will have an annual production capacity of 40GWh and will supply about 2,200 jobs.

In addition to the joint venture with LG Chem, Honda’s also investing $700 million to retool three of its existing Ohio-based car plants for EV production. The move...

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Google Chat upgrades for threading, custom emoji, and security are coming soon

Google finally has release dates for its Workspace upgrades. | Illustration: The Verge

Google has steadily upgraded Workspace throughout the pandemic, and supporting the hybrid workplace took center stage during its Google Cloud Next event this week with new tweaks like an API @ tagging that can pull info from a third-party app into your Google Doc.

As its Workspace suite faces off against competition from Microsoft Teams, Slack, and even Zoom Team Chat, it announced new Google Chat features and release windows for several updates, including the addition of message threading later this month. Google Chat will also spice up its text conversations once it lets users create custom emoji later this year.

GIF: Google

You can create your own emoji to be alongside your usual emoji lineup in Google Chat.

...

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Asteroid-smashing planetary defense test was a success, NASA confirms

An image of asteroid Didymos (bottom left) and its moonlet, Dimorphos, about 2.5 minutes before the impact of NASA’s DART spacecraft on Monday, September 26th, 2022. | Image: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL

When a spacecraft slammed into an asteroid last month, it pushed it closer to its companion and sped up its orbit by about 32 minutes. It’s a huge milestone for the field of planetary defense; it establishes that it may be possible for humans to significantly change the path of a potentially hazardous asteroid — especially if we have warning that one is on the way.

When the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission sent a spacecraft crashing into its surface on September 26th, telescopes on Earth and in space were watching the action. Now, initial data from those observatories have shown that DART achieved its goal. Before the impact, the asteroid Dimorphos took about 11 hours and 55 minutes to orbit its much larger companion...

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Marvel’s delaying Blade, Deadpool 3, Fantastic Four, and Avengers: Secret Wars

Marvel’s Multiverse Saga logo. | Image: Marvel Studios

The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Multiverse Saga is still in full swing, but as tends to be the case with Marvel projects, a number of the studio’s upcoming release dates for its tentpole movies are being pushed back — some rather significantly.

Disney announced today that its new Blade, Deadpool 3, Fantastic Four, and Avengers: Secret Wars features have all been delayed for reasons that the studio didn’t discuss but are interesting to wonder about. Following news that production on Blade was being put on hold, news of a delay for that film doesn’t come as a surprise. But the shuffling of so many big movies does likely mean that following the thread of the MCU’s next couple of phases might get a bit tricky. Going forward, the new release...

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The best tablet and phone deals from Amazon’s Prime Early Access Sale

It doesn’t get much better than the Pixel 6A selling for $329. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

You don’t want to sleep on Amazon’s Prime Early Access Sale if you’re looking for deals on tech products, particularly phones or tablets. Now through tomorrow, October 12th, you’ll be able to save a good amount of cash on some unlocked Pixel phones, a few of Apple’s latest iPads, and a bevy of Amazon-branded Fire tablets. It’s not a total who’s who of a deal event like Black Friday and Cyber Monday — there aren’t really any iPhone deals — but there are more than enough deals to make it worth putting together this post.

If you’re looking for our main post on Prime Early Access Sale deals, we’ve got you covered here. And if you want to see all of our coverage, including posts on individual products we think are worth your money, check out T...

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Mark Zuckerberg takes a shot at Apple’s closed ecosystem

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Mark Zuckerberg is making it clear that he’s ready for a fight with Apple. During Meta’s Connect conference today and in an interview with The Verge, he said that Apple’s currently unannounced VR platform is going to be worse for consumers because it’ll be a “closed ecosystem” while extolling Meta’s system as “open.”

He’s made this point before to his employees, telling them that Meta is in a “very deep, philosophical competition” with Apple for building the future of the metaverse, but today, he made that pitch public. While talking to my colleague Alex Heath about the partners Meta’s working with to improve its VR system, he mentions how the future of VR — be it a closed or open ecosystem — isn’t set yet:

Like in the interview,...

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Major European airlines mislead customers with carbon offset credits, report says

A Lufthansa Boeing 747-430 landing in Barcelona on September 30th, 2022. | Photo by Urbanandsport/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Airlines are selling passengers false hope that they can cancel out their flight’s negative impact on the environment, according to a new report. It probed eight of the biggest airlines in Europe and found that many of them funnel money into highly suspect carbon offset projects that might not actually reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Purchasing carbon offset credits has become a popular way for corporations to absolve themselves of responsibility for the climate-damaging pollution they produce. Airlines might offer customers the option to pay for the offset credits themselves or might have their own commitments to offset emissions from their company’s flights. The money from those credits is supposed to support renewable energy or...

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Google adds customizable EQ to its Pixel Buds Pro earbuds

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Owners of Google’s Pixel Buds Pro can now take much greater control over the way the earbuds sound. Google has announced that, as of the latest firmware update, which has begun “slowly rolling out” today, you can adjust a five-band EQ to customize the audio profile. There are also six presets that are tuned by Google’s audio engineers.

Any custom EQ you settle on will remain active on the Pixel Buds Pro across all your devices until you make changes again. The new firmware update also “contains controls for the left / right balance and general bug fixes and improvements,” according to Google’s support page.

Jam out your way.

With 5-band EQ on #PixelBuds Pro, you can now customize your sound or choose between presets tuned by our...

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Marvel’s Blade has been put on hold

The Blade production logo. | Image: Marvel Studios

Though Marvel’s been hyping up its new Blade feature for quite some time, the studio’s now pumping brakes on the production as it looks for a new director and takes another crack at getting the story just right.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Marvel has shut down production on Blade entirely in Atlanta following former director Bassam Tariq’s move to step back from the project last month. While the studio hopes to start production back up early next year after finding a new director, Marvel’s also reportedly working to “further [develop]” Blade as a whole, suggesting that there’s a significant amount of work to be done before the movie can actually get going again. While these sorts of delays tend not to bode well, Blade isin the...

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Bastion and Torbjörn have been temporarily removed from Overwatch 2

Image: Blizzard

Bugs in Overwatch 2 are like a Hydra — you cut off one head, and two more appear. After login issues, problems with account merges, backlash against the game’s new SMS Protect feature, and taking down the servers twice for emergency fixes, Blizzard had to disable two heroes as bugs were leaving them horrifically (albeit hilariously) broken.

QUICK PSA

Bastion and Torbjörn will be taking a quick trip to the workshop while we iron out a few bugs in their ability kits!

️ Bastion will be unavailable in all modes during this time, while Torbjörn will still be playable in Quick Play. pic.twitter.com/ghjLL5KV7b

— Overwatch (@PlayOverwatch) October 10, 2022

Bastion and Torbjörn are the heroes affected, impacting their ultimate and...

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