Pokémon Sword and Shield is super effective at shutting down some Roku devices

In one of the weirdest video game bugs to date, Pokémon Sword and Shield started plaguing Roku devices in players’ homes. When some users were playing the new Pokémon games, they noticed their Roku devices going on the fritz. And while some thought it was just a bizarre coincidence, Roku’s since confirmed the issue.

In an email to The Verge, Roku explained that it pushed an update to its systems to prevent Sword and Shield from interfering with Roku devices. Roku recommends players place their Switches in airplane mode until their streaming devices finish updating.

Users on the Programmer Humor and Pokémon subreddit have started to unravel the problem for the rest of us. Apparently, both a Switch playing Pokémon and some Rokus are constantly looking for other devices to connect to. For Pokémon, it’s to populate the world with other users. For Roku, it’s to search for nearby Roku devices to update, rather than needing each Roku to pull from a server.

In an incredible fluke, these two devices appear to send and receive data packets via the same port — port 26037 according to Reddit user mykittymadealoaf. When Pokémon sends data out and the Roku accidentally intercepts it, it causes the streaming device to get confused and shut down.

You may not have heard of something like this happening before, mainly because it’s an improbable issue. “The odds are astronomically low,” said mykittymadealoaf. “We could have wound up with an alien planet full of Justin Timberlake clones, but the universe decided this was our colossal fluke.”

This issue is beyond unlikely. But as we mentioned above, Roku’s already fixed the issue, so you can continue to enjoy Netflix while taking on the Gym Challenge.