Roblox is slowly returning back to normal after an outage wiped out one of the most popular games in the world for an entire weekend.
Roblox, which launched in 2006, is a giant platform that allows players around the world to create and sell their own games and in-game items to others. The platform has over 43 million daily active users and those millions of kids log in every day to play Roblox. But, all of its servers went down at around 10:20 am AEDT on October 29.
In the wee hours of October 30, the official Roblox Twitter account posted that it was aware of the server outage and was working on a fix.
We know you’re having issues using Roblox right now.
We’re sorry and working hard to get things back to normal.
— Roblox (@Roblox) October 29, 2021
In another update, around 7 hours later, Roblox said the outage was not related to any specific experiences or partnerships on the platform.
Still making progress on today’s outage. We’ll continue to keep you updated. Once again, we apologize for the delay.
We know that this outage was not related to any specific experiences or partnerships on the platform.
— Roblox (@Roblox) October 29, 2021
This seems to be a reference to the theory among many players that the outage was caused by Chipotle giving away $US1 million dollars-worth of free burritos in Roblox. That event started about an hour before the server crash started.
The outage timing is certainly suspicious, but Roblox is being careful not to blame a big partner for such a huge server collapse. As for the actual reason the servers are down, Roblox still hasn’t actually explained what the cause could be.
At 8:08 am AEDT Sunday morning, Roblox said the underlying cause of the outage had been identified and that it was an internal problem.
We believe we have identified an underlying internal cause of the outage. We’re in the process of performing the necessary engineering and maintenance work to get Roblox back up and running ASAP. Thanks for your patience.
— Roblox (@Roblox) October 30, 2021
It was better news at around 7:00 am Monday, with Roblox slowly returning to normal.
Quick update as we work to get things back to normal. We are incrementally bringing regions back online.
— Roblox (@Roblox) October 31, 2021
At the time of publish, the Roblox website was back up. Its status page said traffic is being allowed incrementally, meaning some, but not all, players will have access.
We’ll update this article as we learn more.