Roblox back online after 3 days of outage; CEO cites 'combination of several factors'

After an outage that began Thursday evening, Roblox is finally back online. The Roblox Corporation on Sunday informed that the online game is now online after three days of outage. David Baszucki, Founder and CEO of Roblox in a blog post apologised to the users for the inconvenience caused by the outage.

Informing that the game was now back up and further explaining the situation, Baszucki said that the company will ‘continue to be transparent in their post-mortem.’ “As most of the Roblox community is aware, we recently experienced an extended outage across our platform. We are sorry for the length of time it took us to restore service. A key value at Roblox is “Respect the Community,” and in this case, we apologize for the inconvenience to our community,” the CEO said in a blog post.

“This was an especially difficult outage in that it involved a combination of several factors,” he added. Baszucki went on to explain that the game went down due to an overload in the system which was prompted by a bug. “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. Rather the failure was caused by the growth in the number of servers in our datacenters,” the company CEO informed.

“Due to the difficulty in diagnosing the actual bug, recovery took longer than any of us would have liked. Upon successfully identifying this root cause, we were able to resolve the issue through performance tuning, re-configuration, and scaling back of some load. We were able to fully restore service as of this afternoon,” the statement said. The Roblox CEO further added that the company will publish a post-mortem with more details once we’ve completed our analysis. “As part of our 'Respect the Community' value, we will continue to be transparent in our post-mortem,” it said.

The company also informed that no loss of player data have been reported so far. “To the best of our knowledge, there has been no loss of player persistence data, and your Roblox experience should now be fully back to normal,” it said and added that players can contact the game’s support team in case of any data loss.

Roblox outage

A global Roblox outage began on 29 October 2021, and from what it looks like, the online gaming platform is not back up yet. Issues on the platform were reported from 04:00 AM IST on 29 October 2021. On Saturday, Roblox Corporation's official Twitter account mentioned in a tweet that the platform was still making progress on the outage. Contrary to popular belief, Roblox clarified that the outage was not caused by any specific experiences or partnerships on the platform. Amidst the outage, Roblox also mentioned on Twitter that the site is offline and is undergoing maintenance, and users will be updated once the site is back up.

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