This weekend was a nightmare for every parent, not because of anything to do with Halloween but the fact that Roblox was down the whole time.
After more than two days of outage Roblox is finally back and working, although it’s going to take a while for it get back to the previous levels of users, as kids slowly come back to the game.
Roblox came back online in the earlier hours of Monday morning, after being out for the whole weekend. A problem which was made worse because Roblox offered no explanation for what was going on.
They have now though and, perhaps most importantly, they’ve assured players – most of who are kids – that there has been no loss of data and everything is now back to normal.
What happened to Roblox?
At first the only explanation for what happened was the thoroughly ambiguous term ‘internal system issue’, which could mean absolutely anything.
It turns out that many were right when they guessed this meant Roblox didn’t know itself, with founder and CEO David Baszucki explaining in a blog post that it was because, ‘a core system in our infrastructure became overwhelmed, prompted by a subtle bug in our backend service communications while under heavy load. This was not due to any peak in external traffic or any particular experience’.
Rumours had suggested that it was something to do with a promotional deal in America, involving $1 million worth of free burritos, but Roblox has denied it was that specifically.
However, they did admit that, ‘due to the difficulty in diagnosing the actual bug, recovery took longer than any of us would have liked’.
Baszucki has promised to publish a post-mortem to explain things in more details, but all most kids are going to care about is that the game is up and working again.
Although according to unofficial source Downdetector, as of Monday morning its player numbers are only a small fraction of normal and may take a day or to reach previous levels.
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