Roblox restored its services Sunday following a major outage that lasted for three days.
Roblox, an online platform which lets users play and create games, began experiencing issues at around 7 p.m. ET on Thursday Oct. 28.
Early reports speculated the outage was related to a Halloween promotion event in partnership with food chain Chipotle. However, Roblox said it was “not related to any specific experiences or partnerships on the platform.”
The company said in an update to its status page last week that it had identified the root cause of the outage as an “internal system issue” and was working on a fix. As of Sunday evening, the platform was fully operational again.
“We are sorry for the length of time it took us to restore service,” David Baszucki, Roblox’s founder and CEO, said in a blog post Sunday.
“This was an especially difficult outage in that it involved a combination of several factors. 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,” he added. “Rather the failure was caused by the growth in the number of servers in our datacenters.”
Baszucki suggested developers on the platform could be compensated for potential losses during the downtime. Roblox shares 30% of the revenue from virtual purchases with its community of creators.
“We will implement a policy to make our creator community economically whole as a result of this outage,” Baszucki said.
For games like Roblox and rival Epic Games’ Fortnite, holidays like Halloween can be key sales generators, as companies try to steer players toward buying promotional in-game items such as new costumes and skins.
Roblox is incredibly popular with children. The app has more than 43.2 million daily active users, and many of them are aged 13 or under.
The New York Times reported Sunday on how several children in America became stressed during the outage, with some instead spending time with family or playing outside over the Halloween weekend.
News of the outage is likely to weigh on Roblox’s share price Monday. The company went public with great fanfare in March, and the stock has since climbed over 20%. Roblox has a market capitalization of $48.3 billion.
Roblox is considered a key player in the so-called “metaverse,” a term which refers to a shared virtual reality. The trend has gained significant momentum lately, which social media giant Facebook changing its name to Meta last week to reflect a growing focus on the metaverse.
– CNBC