Roblox is back online after three days of Halloween outage

Roblox, the gaming platform that is immensely popular amongst young players, said on Twitter Sunday evening that it is back online worldwide.

The recovery came after an outage that lasted three days, a somewhat rare streak of blackout for a tech firm of Roblox’s colossal size. The company said earlier that the cause was an “internal system issue.”

“A core system in our infrastructure became overwhelmed, prompted by a subtle bug in our backend service communications while under heavy load,” David Baszucki, Roblox’s founder and CEO explained in a post after operations were restored.

“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.”

Recovery “took longer” than expected due to “difficulty in diagnosing the actual bug,” Baszucki said.

Rumors had it that a promotional partnership between the gaming platform and Chipotle, which planned to give out $1 million worth of free burritos to Roblox players around Halloween time, led to the crash. Roblox denied in a tweet that the disruption was caused by any “experiences or partnerships” on the platform.

The Roblox crash also came on the heels of Facebook’s rebranding announcement to become Meta. Roblox, which allows users to build and play games, is often seen as the emblem of metaverses.

The outage is not just causing impatience among young users over Halloween weekend but also Roblox’s millions of developers who make money by touting games to kids and teens. Roblox had more than 43 million daily active users as of August.

It remains to be seen whether the three-day disruption will dent Roblox’s investor confidence in the company’s technical capacity once the market opens on Monday.