Earlier today, most of the world effectively shut down thanks to an IT outage. A cybersecurity company named Crowdstrike pushed out an update that bricked millions of PCs around the world, resulting in blue screens of death (BSODs) globally. They might’ve even got the Sphere in Vegas! It’s the closest we’ve come to a genuine Y2K moment, but the Destiny 2 community has been making light of the whole thing.
That’s because Crowdstrike sounds an awful lot like Cloudstrike, an existing weapon in Destiny 2. In fact, they sound so alike that if you search for “cloudstrike” on Twitter, you’ll mostly find posts of people talking about the outage. Folks are now convinced that Cloudstrike is the name of the company that nearly shut down the whole world this morning, which is leading to some confusion online.
In actuality, Cloudstrike is an Arc exotic sniper rifle that was introduced back in 2020’s Beyond Light expansion. Cloudstrike is a pretty potent weapon, generating a powerful lightning strike at the point of impact after getting successive critical hits. Despite that incredible ability, I don’t think it’s capable of incapacitating the whole world like that.
Suffice to say, Destiny 2 fans went online today and were thoroughly confused at the fact that a four-year old weapon was trending for bringing the world to its knees. That didn’t stop them from getting some jokes off though.
Some folks working on the game seem to be getting a kick out of things. For example, one of Destiny 2’s community managers posted a GIF from the sitcom Community, featuring Donald Glover’s character returning to a room only to find it on fire. Most of the replies to his post are joking about Cloudstrike being responsible for the outage. A writer at Bungie posted a screenshot of a now deleted Reddit post that sincerely asked, “Is Cloudstrike meta again?” Another user shared a more intentionally satirical post to the game’s subreddit joking about a “global Cloudstrike issue.”
I’m glad there are some folks out there getting a kick out of things. Now that Trials of Osiris is back up for the weekend, I fully expect some of you to run around with Cloudstrike in honor of today’s historic event.