October 2021 Roblox Outage

The October 2021 Roblox outage occurred on October 28, 2021 when a major player drop occurred across the platform, mainly noticed on popular games when their player counts drastically reduced due to possible issues with their servers. This led to millions of players being unable to join places, with direct impact on communities in every aspect, including Ro-Transit. The main cause of the disruption was due to server issues at Roblox following an expansion of the company's servers to increase capacity on the entire platform.

The outage lasted for three days and was the longest service disruption in recent years for the entire Roblox community.

Overview
Initially, the Roblox website was accessible from October 28, 2021 to October 29, 2021 around 2:30 pm Eastern Time. People visiting the website after the initial shutdowns were only able to view part of the website. People were also unable to join groups, send/receive friend requests and visit games. At this point, Ro-Transit groups were forced to suspend service. The developer forums, however, were not affected and remained accessible (as they are on a separate server from the main Roblox operation), with posts about the outage appearing on the forums.After the Roblox website was taken down, anyone with a Roblox account was logged out on all platforms- going to the site on a web browser would result in being redirected to a generic maintenance screen as repair work to the platform was in progress. It was also impossible to log in through the mobile, Xbox and PC apps during this time (mobile users encountered a connection error). Various groups took to Twitter alongside YouTubers to explain the problems behind the platform and how it would impact their places. Some groups also put up service alerts to remind people there would be no access to any games on the platform during the shutdown. Other users, however, reported intermittent access to the website. While the shutdown was in progress, access to Studio was also suspended so this had an effect on users planning to work on their places.

Roblox has stated that the outage is not a result of the Chipotle Mexican Grill event that was happening at the time, which would reward players with a burrito in real life through a coupon code if they were one of the first 30 000 people to visit the virtual location daily, alongside any games in particular. This initially likened the possibilities of the company being hit by a distributed denial of service attack (DDOS). While many people have taken to Twitter to complain, others posted predictions, surveys and support to Roblox's maintenance team for continuing to resolve the problems there. As of October 30, they stated they were working to restore access "as soon as possible." As for the Chipotle event, it has become a meme when Roblox goes down for maintenance due to server problems. In addition, some players thought the hit "Adopt Me" was also to blame, being the most popular game on the platform and also has been the cause of past issues which took the website down.

On October 31, 2021 around 1:00 pm Eastern Time (early morning of November 1 in Asian Pacific regions), Roblox began gradually restoring access to its services, beginning with less populated regions and moving to more densely populated areas to prevent the site from crashing. This came after they posted on Twitter that they had identified the root cause of the outage. Roblox was fully restored by the evening of October 31, 2021 (November 1 in Europe, Asia and Australia). In a post by David Baszucki, the founder of Roblox, he explained that the outage was the result of a communication failure between servers intended to improve player experience.

Ro-Transit Operations
Following Roblox being taken down, operations on all Ro-Transit groups within the platform and access to maps were suspended until Roblox's website was restored, which include scheduled runs and other events. This also included being unable to access group pages on the Roblox website and mobile app. Media outside the platform (websites affiliated with groups, social media pages and Discord servers) remain accessible. However, for groups with runs scheduled for the few days Roblox was shut down, those were cancelled or postponed.

While there were complaints and memes, outages were beyond the control of the community and groups. Ro-Transit operations gradually resumed as more users regained access to Roblox. Some groups and users did post games and trivia quizzes on social media to help the player base pass time, showing resilience with millions of people worldwide.

Ro-Transit Development
Some developers were able to continue working on projects if they left Roblox Studio opened initially; however, they were only able to save their files locally (as .rbxl files). On October 29, with Roblox logging out all of its users, developers could no longer access Studio until the situation was resolved. On October 31, 2021 (November 1 in Asia, Australia and New Zealand), Studio became accessible in offline mode until Roblox services were fully restored. Upon the outage being resolved, online saving resumed for all developers.