Roblox, a famous online video game, was unexpectedly pulled down for three days over the weekend, shocking gamers all around the world.
The disruption was just momentary, and service was restored on November 1. Despite this, the outage was noticed, particularly by the game's target demographic: young children. This outage left kids distraught and depressed, but more importantly, they were left wondering what had happened to Roblox's illustrious firm.
What is a Roblox? (boomers only section)
Roblox isn't exactly a video game; it's more of an online gaming platform and game development system, similar to one of the many features in the popular game Minecraft. This essentially lets users to design their own games and share them with other platform users.
The game was created by the Roblox Corporation in 2006 and went largely unnoticed, until It gradually gained popularity over the next ten years, peaking during the COVID-19 pandemic. The game's primary users are children, with the firm claiming that over half of all children in the United States under the age of 16 play it, according to The Verge in July 2020. The game is free to play on PC, Mac, iOS, and Android, however, there are microtransactions in the form of Robux, an in-game currency.
When did Roblox shut down?
The platform began to have troubles on October 28 at roughly 7:00 p.m. EST. The platform went down entirely soon.
The company worked for days to resolve the problem, and it was finally resolved on November the 1st.
Why did Roblox shut down?
Whether the fast-food company Chipotle was in any way connected to the outage was a question that arose during the outage. This is due to a Chipotle promotion in the game, which was created in collaboration with the restaurant company. Many people wondered if the collab, which went live on the site at 6:30 p.m. EST on October 28, was related to the troubles caused.
However, the firm denied this and stated on Twitter, "We know that this downtime was not tied to any specific experiences or partnerships on the platform." The Roblox Corporation acknowledged in a statement to The Verge that it was not caused by an external intrusion, such as a hack.
On October 31, Roblox Corporation CEO David Baszucki provided an update on the outage, stating that the problem was internal. He didn't go into depth about the problem, but he did shed some light on some of the specifics.
In a blog post, he stated, "This was an unusually tough outage in that it involved a mix of numerous reasons." "Under severe pressure, a critical system in our infrastructure became overrun, triggered by a small error in our backend service communications." This was not due to a spike in external traffic or a specific event. The issue was instead caused by the increased number of servers in our datacenters. As a result, most Roblox services were unable to communicate and deploy properly."
After the company finishes analyzing the issue, it will provide a "post-mortem" report on the Roblox outage.
The truth, not just a conspiracy:
When Roblox has been shut down for more than 48 hours, I could not stop shaking and I had severe withdrawals. I woke up during those 3 terrible days, just trying to log onto Roblox over and over, but the site was down. I had a major panic attack but managed to calm down after I was told that Roblox would extend their limited-time Halloween event for a few more days. But afterwards, I passed out and went to a state of coma, and was only brought back up when I dreamt about playing “adopt me“ with the boys. And then, I started to hallucinate after staring at Roblox’s “oh no, server is down” page for 7 hours straight without blinding.
I couldn't go to sleep that night, and the only thing I could do was to pray to the Roblox gods to make the servers work again. I was broken.
And after seeing Roblox outright lie to us, their loyal consumers, I was enraged. This is an outright lie, and just a stupid excuse to hide the truth. So I did some research. And I have found an answer. Roblox has been shut down because Chipotle’s burrito didn’t want to get eaten, so it hacked Roblox and doxxed everyone (that’s… that’s the whole joke… leave me alone it’s 3 am ok?)