Helldivers 2 players get the whole Discord locked down by pressing F to pay too much respect

The official Helldivers 2 Discord was locked down last night after members repeatedly spammed "F" in every channel to pay respects.

"F" is pretty much a universal sign of paying respects nowadays, thanks to Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare's 'Press F to Pay Respects' moment. It seems Helldivers 2 players have been paying a little too much respect in the game's official Discord channel, repeatedly spamming "F" in every channel to the point where they were warned of bans being handed out by moderators.

Helldivers Discord mod pinged the entire server to tell people that repeatedly spamming "F" in the chat would get them banned.Now everyone is spamming "F" in the chat."Now this is managed democracy" pic.twitter.com/XK9PefM9wXFebruary 15, 2024

That apparently didn't hinder the Helldivers of Super Earth, who just continued spamming "F" in every channel while completely ignoring the mod. There are well over 120,000 members of the Discord channel, and they're a pretty active bunch - the group's three main text channels typically get well over five new messages a minute during the day.

So you can imagine just how fast and ferocious the "F"'s were coming in. As Kotaku reporter Ethan Gach chronicled below on Twitter, the entire Discord group was temporarily locked down, which means no one new could be invited to the Discord group, and no new messages could be posted on any of the channels.

Update: entire Helldivers Discord (over 120,000 members) is on lockdown after every channel was overrun with Fs in the chat. https://t.co/dlhzvCWu5D pic.twitter.com/iAoxTs3QMTFebruary 15, 2024

This seemingly only lasted a few hours, because now the Helldivers Discord is back up and running as normal, without an "F" as far as the eye can see. Hopefully, this has sorted the entire thing out, and now the Discord group is up and running as normal. It's pretty funny at first glance, but plenty of strangers genuinely use the Helldivers Discord to squad up and fight the Terminids and Automatons