Helldivers 2 takes a crack at the CrowdStrike outage as its Destroyers suffer from a systems update: 'Please manually reboot each affected computer 15 times'

helldivers 2 operation swift disassembly — (Image credit: Arrowhead Game Studios)

Helldivers 2 has been 2024's live service hit, a lot of which is down to how developer Arrowhead manages the overarching Galactic War with constant Major Orders, while being highly reactive to player behaviour. Usually that finds expression with things like exceptional rewards for exceptional heroics, 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 with a $4,300 donation to Save the Children.

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, affecting over 8.5 million Windows and Linux machines worldwide: 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 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 could take up to 15 reboots 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, Escalation of Freedom, arriving August 6 with new enemy types, new biomes, and an even harder difficulty level.

Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as "[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike."