What is “bricking”? The term means a device won't function and isn't recoverable. “It is as useful as a brick.” For the Nintendo Switch, this often appears as stuck in the boot screen or not booting at all.

How do switches get bricked?

The bricking problem has been a thing for the past several years and is most famously blamed on using third party devices to charge or dock the Switch, and VectorDriver breaks it all down in a semi-dense electrical engineer tutorial of conductors, voltage, and Switch innards.

Can jailbreaking a switch brick it?

It's been revealed that the piracy-enabling firmware recently launched for Nintendo Switch contains 'brick code' that can render the device inoperable, designed to stop it from being copied - a somewhat ironic state of affairs.