Following a prolonged outage beginning on October 28, Roblox is finally back online. Roblox is one of the world's most popular games thanks to its free-to-play model, wide platform availability, and a plethora of available games contained within.
The Roblox server outage began October 28 with users began having issues connecting with the platform. The support team quickly sprang into action, but players kept disconnecting before finally losing access entirely.
As it turns out, this particular outage was extremely complicated due to several issues working in tandem. The issue began with a "subtle bug" in the backend service communications, which would occur when they were under a heavy load. This would then cause a "core system" within the infrastructure to become overwhelmed. David Baszucki, Founder and CEO of Roblox, says this wasn't due to any particular experience or peak in external traffic from Roblox users. Rather, it was caused by the increased number of servers added to their datacenters. This resulted in what is essentially a traffic jam in the data and prohibited services from communicating and deploying effectively.
There's little technical information available at this time, but a post-mortem is promised once the team has had time to complete their analysis. A plan for preventing such issues in the future will also be released at that time in addition to "a policy to make our creator community economically whole as a result of the outage".
Seeing a major service like Roblox go down across multiple platforms is an enticing piece of bait for many. Almost immediately, memes and rumors of the tie-in event with Chipotle kicked off. Further rumors of hackers, DDOS attacks, and all manner of possible root causes began to flood the internet. However, now that we know the root cause, it serves as just another reminder of how complicated games and their underlying hardware have become. These days, it's no longer as simple as plugging a cartridge into the console and playing. Now, games require constant updates, internet connections, expensive network infrastructure, and servers to be operational. Should just one piece fail, it brings it all down like a house of cards.
Server problems and network issues are no strangers to online games. It is unfortunate that Roblox had this particular issue when launching a partnered event with Chipotle and on a holiday weekend. But, when considering how long issues like this can affect many games and how complicated this particular issue was, it's impressive their team was able to identify the issue and bring everything back up as quickly as they have.
Roblox is currently available on iOS, Android, PC, and Xbox One.
Source: Roblox Blog