Game trips modem/router breaker

  • Posted 20 hours ago by simpaticoder
  • 4 points
Running Empire of the Ants on Steam Machine, this game (and only this game) does one of the strangest things I've ever experienced with any software: somehow, it trips the breaker feeding my router and modem. Frankly, I don't understand how this is possible, but it is reproducible. My first thought was that it was causing a power surge on the SM itself, but that's a different breaker. My second thought was that somehow it was triggering a load on the router and/or modem. The router and modem are connected to wall power through a UPS, so the game continues to play normally. I used the UPS display to show me output wattage but I didn't see a spike.

No other game on the SM, and no other console or device has ever done this and the situation is at once horrifying and fascinating. My only other thought is that the UPS is reacting to a stray Wifi signal originating with the SM and increasing load, triggering the breaker. But AFAIK the UPS is not set up to interact with Wifi at all, and frankly this seems very unlikely. I'm posting this in the hopes that someone else is experiencing something similar and we can get to the bottom of this mystery. And I thought of the HN crowd because I know we all love the "my software only crashes when it rains" type stories.

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