Roblox comes back online after being down for three days

After a three-day outage, the online gaming platform Roblox is now back online, with the company promising to compensate game developers for any income they have lost. 

Roblox is an online platform that operates as an app store. It enables users to play a variety of video games, which are all produced by independent developers. 

It is a hugely popular gaming platform, especially with children. The app has over 43 million daily users, including many under the age of 18. 

It has become even more popular during COVID-19. In fact, according to a report by The Verge, over 50% of kids in the US played Roblox in 2020 at the height of the pandemic. 

Why did Roblox stop working?

Users first reported being unable to access Roblox late Thursday evening. So, why did Roblox crash? After an investigation by the company over the weekend, it found that the cause of the outage was an “internal system issue”. 

As of Sunday evening, the platform was reported to be fully working. However, because holiday periods are peak times for gamers, the company says that it will make sure developers relying on the platform for their income are  “economically whole as a result of this outage.”

In a blog post, company CEO David Baszucki wrote, “As most of the Roblox community is aware, we recently experienced an extended outage across our platform. We are sorry for the length of time it took us to restore service. A key value at Roblox is ‘Respect the Community,’ and in this case, we apologize for the inconvenience to our community.”

He added, “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.”