October 2021 Roblox Outage

Overview

The October 2021 Roblox Outage refers to a sitewide outage of the video game platform Roblox that occurred in late October 2021. Due to Roblox's recent partnership with Mexican food chain Chipotle, many joked or assumed that the game's outage had to do with Chipotle, though Roblox stated it was not the reason. The site was reportedly out for over 60 hours.

Background

On October 26th, 2021, Roblox announced a partnership with the food chain Chipotle to host an in-game event that would award players with virtual Chipotle-related prizes (seen below).^[1]

On October 28th, the Chipotle-themed game was then released on Roblox. The game was a maze for players to explore and get to the "Boorito," which was located at the end of the level. The event promised that each day, the first 30,000 players who got the in-game burrito would win free real-life burrito vouchers, as well as in-game accessories and discount codes (trailer show below).

Developments

The next day on October 29th, 2021, the entirety of the Roblox site and servers were affected by a huge increase of traffic, resulting in a full shutdown of Roblox services, including the services on Xbox and mobile devices. Roblox acknowledged the shutdown on their Twitter account (shown below, left).^[2] They also said the outage was "not related to any specific experiences or partnerships on the platform,"^[3] indicating the Chipotle partnership was not the reason the site had an outage. Instead of taking users to the home page on Roblox, the site showed a message notifying users that the site was under maintenance (shown below, right).

On October 31st, Roblox CEO David Bascuki posted a letter^[4] to the community apologizing for the outage and alerting users the developers had fixed the problems that caused it (transcript seen below).

This was an especially difficult outage in that it involved a combination of several factors. 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 datacenters. The result was that most services at Roblox were unable to effectively communicate and deploy.

Online Reactions

As the outage happened shortly after the Chipotle partnership launched, many users assumed the partnership had caused the outage. This led to a surge of memes about how Chipotle had broken Roblox. For example, Twitter user @BalanaWendell^[5] posted a Who Would Win? joke about the outage, gaining over 180 retweets and 3,500 likes (shown below, left). User @tenorio_ethan^[6] posted a Quiz Kid meme about the outage, gaining over 100 retweets and 2,000 likes (shown below, right).

Search Interest

External References