It seems a “subtle bug” was responsible for the outage. As Roblox founder and CEO David Baszucki puts it in his blog post: “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. 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.” Now that the game’s back online, the company is looking to make things right economically for the community - players can buy and sell items for virtual currency called Robux, and an interruption in service means an interruption in sales. What making it economically right means exactly isn’t clear, so hopefully we’ll see soon. Prior to this, it was rumored that a Chipotle promotion giving away $1 million in burritos was to blame for the outage, something that was quickly denied by Roblox Corp. Roblox is a ridiculously popular game with well over 100 million active users at this point, with the company seemingly eager to port it to other platforms. The game’s even played host to a Lil Nas X concert. Roblox is available now for PC, Xbox One, and mobile devices.
