Helldivers 2 takes a crack at the CrowdStrike outage as its Destroyers suffer from a systems update_

Helldivers 2 has been 2024's live service hit, a lot of which is down to how developer Arrowhead manages the with constant Major Orders, while being highly reactive to player behaviour. Usually that finds expression with things like , though sometimes it even bleeds outside of the game itself: such as when the Helldivers chose to save a kids' hospital for no rewards, and Arrowhead responded .

Now for the first time some of the real world has found its way into Helldivers 2. Last week an update from Crowdstrike caused global IT chaos, : this was serious business, impacting airlines, train companies, health and emergency services, and all the way down to whether you could buy a coffee. Loading [[link]] up Helldivers 2 currently, which sees you begin the game on the bridge of your Destroyer spacecraft, sees the following "Systems Update" message: 

"A cybersecurity software update has caused an unexpected outage for all Destroyer surveillance systems. All personnel are ordered to manually record their own behavior until services are restored.

"Instructions to service technicians: to bring systems back online, please manually reboot each affected computer 15 times."

This is a pretty good gag, and ties in nicely with some of the more subterranean elements of Helldivers' world. Notably that the Destroyer craft itself, which naturally remains the property of Super Earth, is a massive surveillance system keeping track of your Helldiver's behaviour, and that in its absence we're all mandated to self-report what we've been up to.

Then the punchline, which is a reference to a temporary fix being used in the early stages of the Crowdstrike outage. The update caused millions of machines to enter the "blue screen of death" (BSOD) state, meaning they had to be manually restarted by an IT worker, with Microsoft saying that it before an individual machine was fixed.

There's no in-game reference beyond this, though I did check carefully to see if any of my Destroyer's screens had a BSOD (you missed a trick there Arrowhead). Elsewhere in Helldivers 2, the main event is now the runup to the game's first major expansion, , arriving August [[link]] 6 with new enemy types, new biomes, and an even harder difficulty level.