Online game platform Roblox back after 3-day outage

Roblox service was restored on Sunday evening after the outage left millions of the online platform's players without access to their games.

San Francisco: Popular virtual gaming platform Roblox has announced that it is finally returning to normal after facing a three-day outage.

Roblox service was restored on Sunday evening after the outage left millions of the online platform’s players without access to their games.

“We have identified the root cause and solution. We are working on getting things back online and we will keep you updated throughout the day,” Roblox said in a tweet on Sunday.

Roblox has over 200 million monthly players that is used by two-thirds of kids aged nine to 12 in the US.

Right now the company has not offered any details about why the platform went down. Some users suggested the issue may have been linked to a promotional partnership with Chipotle that launched shortly before Roblox hit the buffers.

However, in a blog post by David Baszucki, Roblox founder and CEO, explained that the outage was caused by several factors in combination.

“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 data centres. The result was that most services at Roblox were unable to effectively communicate and deploy,” Baszucki noted.

The company reported a revenue of $588.7 million during the first nine months of 2020, a 68 per cent increase over the same period in 2019.

Roblox went public via a direct listing in March and said in its prospectus that its users spent an average of 2.6 hours daily on the platform over the past year.