Videogame company Roblox Corp. suffered an outage on Thursday evening that continued through Saturday, leaving children around the world looking for other entertainment over the Halloween weekend.
Roblox is a free online website and app containing millions of videogame and other entertainment experiences, all created by its own users rather than the company itself.
According to internal metrics, in August, Roblox had over 48 million users who spent 4 billion hours on it. The platform is especially popular with preteens.
“We believe we have identified the underlying internal cause of the outage. We are in the process of performing the necessary engineering and maintenance work to get Roblox back up and running ASAP,” Roblox said on Twitter on Saturday evening.
The outage began when the company launched a Halloween-themed event in partnership with Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc., with the restaurant chain promising Roblox users more than $1 million in free burritos. Roblox tweeted on Friday that the outage was “not related to any specific experience or partnership on the platform.”
The traffic jam continued till late Saturday evening. In an email, a Roblox spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal that “there was no evidence of outside intrusion.”
Outages affecting a large number of users are relatively common. Earlier this month, Facebook Inc’s services went offline for six hours. The company apologized for the incident, which affected its core platforms and apps, including WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger.
A recently completed global survey by Uptime Institute LLC, a provider of consulting services on data-center reliability, found that 69% of data-center operators had some form of disruption in the past three years. Human error played a role in 78% of those incidents, and 44% had major financial, reputational and other consequences.
Roblox’s business model focuses on users’ purchase of virtual currency that allows them to receive in-game perks or items for their avatars. It does not have advertising facility.
Like Facebook, soon to be renamed Meta Platforms Inc., Roblox is one of those recently looking to increase interest in the metaverse, defined as the broader futuristic online world where people exist. and interact in a shared virtual space through digital avatars.
Roblox users interact as avatars and are transported from one experience to another, including concerts by popular real-world artists. In September, for example, millions of fans logged onto the stage over the weekend to watch Twenty One Pilots perform.
This story has been published without modification to the text from a wire agency feed
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