Roblox down: widespread server outage affects millions of players

On Oct 30, 2021

Roblox has been down for more than two days, with the game and its related website offline for millions of players. The hugely popular game-creating platform first started having issues at around 7PM ET on October 28th. Roblox initially said it was “working hard to get things back to normal,” and that it had identified “the root cause as [an] internal system issue.”

In a statement to The Verge, Roblox confirms its platform isn’t down due to an “external intrusion,” and that the company is working “around the clock” to resolve the huge outage. “We believe we have identified an underlying internal cause of the outage with no evidence of an external intrusion,” says a Roblox spokesperson. “We are in the process of performing the necessary engineering and maintenance work to get Roblox back up and running as soon as possible. We apologize that our community is unable to be on Roblox during this time.”

Initially, some Robox players speculated the outage could be related to a Chipotle promotion in the game. Chipotle is giving away $1 million worth of free burritos on Roblox as part of Halloween event in the game. The experience went live at 6:30PM ET on October 28th, just before the widespread Roblox outage began.

Still making progress on today’s outage. We’ll continue to keep you updated. Once again, we apologize for the delay.

We know that this outage was not related to any specific experiences or partnerships on the platform.

— Roblox (@Roblox) October 29, 2021

Roblox was quick to reveal its issues aren’t related to the Chipotle promotion, though. “We know that this outage was not related to any specific experiences or partnerships on the platform,” says the official Roblox Twitter account.

It’s a surprisingly long outage for Roblox, with players still waiting to hear exactly when the game will return. The main Roblox site is offline in a maintenance mode, and the status page was only updated after more than 24 hours earlier today.

Roblox is very popular, especially with kids — more than 50 percent of Roblox players are under the age of 13. More than 40 million people play it daily, and its popularity surged through 2020 during the pandemic. Millions of people have flocked to the game-creating game, app, platform, or however you want to describe it, to play games, attend gigs, and even appear at awards shows.

Update, October 30th 5:05PM ET: Article updated with a statement from Roblox.