Helldivers 2 dispatch pokes fun at the CrowdStrike update fumble

American cybersecurity company CrowdStrike recently pushed an update to its software that caused business systems worldwide to crash. Ultimately, the issue was caused by a lack of proper testing, but it caused havoc for some time. According to a recent in-game dispatch, the problem even seems to have reached Super Earth’s computers in Helldivers 2.

The dispatch in question is hilarious and pokes fun at the whole CrowdStrike update fumble perfectly. “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 service is restored.” Of course, Super Earth’s main priority is maintaining managed democracy, so I’m sure a few dissenters happily handed themselves in after the outage was rectified.

Turn it off and on again until it works

But there’s more. Following up the message above were the best instructions I’ve ever seen for bringing a computer back online. “Instructions to Service Technicians: To bring systems back online, please manually reboot each affected computer 15 times.” I saw reports of some businesses needing to delete certain system files, but bashing the on button 15 times is a much more Helldivers 2 way to fix a problem.

The Helldiveres 2 community has lovingly referred to the incident as “Super Windows” on the game’s subreddit. User Finbarrgalloway pointed out an interesting link that shows Microsoft’s software is still being used in this fictional future, which is probably why CrowdStrike’s update impacted Super Earth. “The terminals do mention .sys files when you boot them so Super Earth does canonically run on Windows.”

User B33rski pointed out something I’d also wish we’d seen. “I assumed this was the crowd strike joke. I was hoping it would affect our strat game on the ship!” While it would be complete chaos, it would have been very funny to have our Stratagems mess up or stop working for 24 hours following CrowdStrike’s update deployment.

While this dispatch is obviously just meant to be a fun little nod to the real-world incident. “Definite CrowdStrike reference. One of the solutions is to reboot the affected system 15 times, as it would be enough time between errors to download the update that removes the file causing the issue.” There’s a large thread with this comment of users debating how the update could be worked around by just turning your computer on and off again in rapid succession. It seems to work in Helldivers 2, so that’s good enough for me.

This is the first time that developer Arrowhead Game Studios has so obviously referenced a real-world event in Helldivers 2. We’ve had phishing scams from the Automatons and live-action movies, but we’ve never had an event so quickly translated to the game.

The reaction from fans has been fantastic because everyone instantly gets what this cybersecurity issue is about and is leaning into it even more. Provided the developer sticks to lighter topics, I’d love to see more dispatches like this adding flavor to the galaxy.