In case you missed it, the Roblox platform had a mysterious extended outage over the weekend starting late last week, but as of late last night, it has been resolved and Roblox is once again back online. According to an update shared by Roblox Corporation CEO David Baszucki, the whole issue was caused by “a subtle bug” that cascaded to become a major issue.
“This was an especially difficult outage in that it involved a combination of several factors,” the update from Baszucki reads in part. “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.”
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“Due to the difficulty in diagnosing the actual bug, recovery took longer than any of us would have liked,” the update from Baszucki continues. “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.”
It is worth noting here that while Baszucki’s update indicates that this was not due to “any particular experience” or “peak in external traffic,” it does cite heavy load as a factor. There had been speculation online that a promotion with Chipotle had overwhelmed the service, but that does not seem to be the case. Even so, Baszucki has promised a post-mortem with further details once analysis is complete as well as the specific steps being taken to avoid the same sort of issue going forward.
As noted above, Roblox is back online once again. A post-mortem of the recent outage is expected to eventually be published. You can check out all of our previous coverage of Roblox right here.
What do you think about the extended Roblox outage recently? Are you curious to see the post-mortem promised by Baszucki? Let us know in the comments, or feel free to reach out and hit me up directly over on Twitter at @rollinbishop to talk about all things gaming!
