The recent Roblox mess finally got patched last night. The gamers all across the globe finally were slowly able to get back into their games. This whole mess led to a mob of angry gamers complaining on social media, as they like to do. But now, the company has come out to explain what went wrong. In short, everything that could go wrong with the servers, did.
The update just published by the developer has helped shed some light on the whole mess, and what caused the Roblox outage. According to a blog post from Roblox CEO David Baszucki, the issue was really hard to find. The bug itself was related to the way new servers communicated with each other, causing a self-magnifying load issue. As the team tried to find the bug, they had to dig through way more processes and logs than they planned. That’s why this all took so long.
The team did assure players that no data has been lost, at least in terms of persistent and player-facing content. Now, on to what went wrong.
“This was an especially difficult outage in that it involved a combination of several factors. A core system in our infrastructure became overwhelmed,” explains the update. This then triggered a very subtle bug within other server infrastructure. As the team brought more capacity online to deal with increased user load, the servers became more unstable. “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,” said Baszucki.
If you want a more technical analysis, you’ll have to wait. The team is still diagnosing what went wrong. But they do promise to bring out a more comprehensive post to explain what went wrong soon.