Three hotfixes in three weeks, and not one of them was about gameplay. Between 20 August and 10 September, Offworld Industries shipped Squad 10.5.3, 10.5.4 and 10.5.5, and all three exist for the same reason: people had found ways to crash live servers and jam the queues of players trying to join them. If you rent a Squad server, this was the patch cycle that actually mattered, even though nothing in it changes how a firefight feels.
Three hotfixes, three weeks, one problem
The sequence is easy to miss if you only read the headline patches:
- 10.5.3 (20 August): mod checksum and signature fixes, aimed at crashes and disconnects on modded servers.
- 10.5.4 (3 September): vulnerabilities being used to disrupt servers, trigger crashes, and create infinite queue times.
- 10.5.5 (10 September): further server-side exploits causing server crashes.
Read the wording of the last two and the pattern is obvious. Offworld described 10.5.5 as "aimed at addressing additional vulnerabilities being used to crash servers and disrupt player queues", and in 10.5.4 said it was working with "both our hosts and community partners to counteract malicious behaviors". Patch notes that name hosting partners and tell players to contact their server leads are not describing a theoretical bug. They are describing an operational problem that was hitting live communities.
What a server-side exploit means here
Offworld has not published the specifics, and while fixes are still rolling out that is the right call: a detailed writeup of a crash vector is a set of instructions. What the notes do make clear is the shape of the problem, and it is consistent across all three releases.
This was not a cheat client grinding out kills in a match. It targeted the server process itself. That means a single actor could drop a 100 player match for everyone in it, or leave the join queue in a state that never resolves.
The distinction matters for anyone running a community. A cheater ruins a round and gets banned. A crash exploit ruins a player base, because the regulars who sat through a 40 person queue twice in one evening quietly stop showing up on Thursday.
It also explains the release cadence. Three fixes in three weeks is not a sign of sloppiness, it is what patching looks like while the problem is still being actively exploited. Each closed route exposed the next one, and each build had to ship before the next evening's prime time.
The mod checksum bug that set the stage
10.5.3 is the most technically detailed of the three, and it is the one to read closely if you run a modded server.
Offworld's own explanation is worth quoting: "Our transition to Unreal Engine 5 introduced a new storage format that caused checksum calculation errors to go undetected." In plain terms, the game stopped reliably noticing when a player's Steam Workshop mod files were out of date. Clients were being allowed onto modded servers while holding mod files that did not match what the server was running, which surfaced as "Network object failure" errors and frequent disconnects.
The hotfix closed three specific holes: crashes on game start with mods that ship a precompiled shader cache, clients being allowed to join modded servers with mismatched mod files, and a signature verification rule that was being applied incorrectly to mods and crashing anything containing PSO cache files.
This all sits on top of a change from Update 10.5 itself, which moved the Mod SDK to 10.5 and required every existing mod to be recooked before it would be compatible. Offworld's advice at the time still holds: if you hit an infinite loading loop after updating, unsubscribe from Workshop mods until their creators have recooked them.
Infinite queues were the symptom players actually noticed
Crashes get reported. Queues get resented. 10.5.4 named the second one directly, listing vulnerabilities used to "create infinite queue times for players attempting to join servers".
From a community management point of view that is the worse outcome. A crash is unambiguous: everyone drops, everyone knows to rejoin, nobody blames the admin. A queue counter that sits at 12 and never moves just looks like a badly run server, and the player watching it has no way to tell the difference between an attack and incompetence. Several weeks of that does real damage to a server's reputation.
Squad makes this sharper than most games. Rounds are long and 100 player layers fill up in the evening, so queuing is a normal part of starting a session. That is exactly why a stuck queue does not read as a fault straight away: the player assumes they are waiting their turn, and only works out ten minutes later that the number never moved. By then they have gone somewhere else.
What to do if you run a Squad server
Five things, in the order they matter:
- Be on 10.5.5. This is the whole point of the release. A server pinned to an older build is a server still carrying the vulnerabilities these three hotfixes closed.
- Audit your mod list. Anything that has not been recooked since Update 10.5 is suspect. Check each Workshop item's last update date rather than assuming.
- Learn the symptom pattern. Repeated "Network object failure" errors, clients bouncing immediately after connecting, and a frozen queue counter are the signals worth watching for, not just a hard crash.
- Make restarts boring. A scheduled restart cycle plus the ability to force one quickly turns a crash from an evening-ending event into a two minute interruption.
- Talk to your host. Offworld pointed players at their server hosting leads in two consecutive patch notes for a reason.
Running your Squad server on DoomHosting
Staying current is most of the defence here, so the practical question is how quickly you can act. A Squad server from DoomHosting gives you instant setup, one-click restarts and full FTP access from the control panel, plus DDoS protection and 24/7 support when something does go sideways at 9pm on a Saturday.
If you are setting one up for the first time, the Squad server getting started guide walks through the first boot and config, and how to join a Squad server covers getting your regulars connected. You can also check whether a server is answering right now with the Squad server status checker.
Three hotfixes in three weeks is not a good look on paper, but the response time here was the right one. The fastest thing any admin can do is make sure their own server is actually running the build that fixes it.
