Roblox says games back online after 3-day outage
Millions of young players had been unable to access their games for several days.
Roblox offers young players access to millions of games.
Roblox said Sunday evening that access to its game platform had been restored after a three-day outage left millions of the online platform's young players without access to their games.
Roblox announced on its status page at 4:45 p.m. PT that it had resumed normal operations. "All services have recovered and users should now be able to access all parts of Roblox," the company said, adding that the cause of the outage is still under investigation.
The game-creation platform, which is wildly popular with preteens, went offline around 4 p.m. PT on Thursday, according to an internal status post that day that said the company had identified the cause of the outage and was working on a solution. The company posted a series of similar updates over the following days reiterating that it believed it had identified the problem and was working on a fix.
"We have identified root cause and solution. We are working on getting things back online and we will keep you updated throughout the day," Roblox said in a tweet Sunday morning.
We have identified root cause and solution. We are working on getting things back online and we will keep you updated throughout the day.
— Roblox (@Roblox) October 31, 2021
The delay in fixing the issue frustrated many users, who turned to Twitter to voice their irritation. "I have already cried 14 times, I cannot live without roblox gacha games and rogue lineage. People don't understand what it is like," wrote one user.
Another described their child having a violent reaction to the dayslong outage. "My son was literally crying when he couldn't play Roblox. He started throwing things around the room and broke my favorite vase," the user wrote on Saturday.
A tweet from Roblox on Friday afternoon sought to dispel speculation that the outage was caused by the popularity of a promotion on the platform. Roblox said the outage "was not related to any specific experiences or partnerships on the platform," an apparent reference to a promotion on the platform with Chipotle in which the restaurant was giving away $1 million worth of burritos.
Roblox apologized to its users Sunday, explaining that outage was caused by server issues.
"The outage involved growth in the number of servers in our datacenters, and was not due to any peak in external traffic or any particular experience," a Roblox spokesperson said in a statement.
Roblox, which was founded in 2004, is a platform where you can create your own games or join ones others have made. Roblox's avatars look a little like Lego minifigs. Roblox has more than 43 million daily users -- more than half of whom are under the age of 13.