Helldivers 2 servers down because ‘someone tripped on the network cable’

Helldivers 2 players endured an unwanted surprise when the servers dropped on launch day, apparently because “someone tripped on the network cable.”

Arrowhead Game’s sequel to the 2015 original enjoyed a surge in popularity upon launch today, with Helldivers 2 surpassing over 60,000 concurrent players on Steam in just a few hours. But that success came alongside issues.

Issues with the Quickplay feature were prevalent, leading CEO Johan Pilestedt to say the devs were in “crisis mode” as they battled to fix the issues, and things soon got worse when the servers went down entirely.

Players showed up on Discord and Reddit in droves to question what happened, with many hoping that the drop in servers was intentional to issue a fix for Quickplay. But it soon became clear that was not the case and the drop was completely accidental.

In a message on Discord, Pilestedt said “an optimization update to the backend” led to the team being “unfortunately gate rushed.” In case anyone struggled with that terminology, a simple translation was offered that “someone tripped on the network cable” and the “head of backend says sorry.”

Though it’s unlikely that the servers went down because a member of the team literally stumbled on a wire, the amusing anecdote shows the Arrowhead Games team is high in spirits despite teething issues with the title, which they’re working hard to resolve.

It’s fair to say these weren’t the sort of bugs the dev team was hoping to squash on launch day, but these sorts of issues are to be expected when a game achieves levels of success that were not expected and the communication from the team shows they’re committed to getting everything in working order. Those on the frontline in the battle for Super Earth will need to hold their ground until support arrives.