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Roblox back online after three-day outage

Roblox back online after three-day outage

Games platform Roblox is back online after a three-day outage.

Users started to have difficulties in connecting to the service in the afternoon of Thursday, October 29th before they were unable to log on at all. In a blog post on the company's corporate site, CEO David Baszucki (pictured) said that this outage was the result of a "subtle bug" in the firm's backend that caused Roblox's infrastructure to become "overwhelmed."

Due to its nature, this bug took some time to find, resulting in Roblox being down for three days. The company has said that it will be publishing a post-mortem as to specifically what went wrong in the near future.

"This was an especially difficult outage in that it involved a combination of several factors," Baszucki wrote.

"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 result was that most services at Roblox were unable to effectively communicate and deploy.

"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."

In August, Roblox revealed it had 48.2 million daily active users.

 


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PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.