Roblox players face hours of downtime over the long weekend

Child-focused game and creation platform Roblox has gone offline, with a major outage preventing its sizable player base from getting into the game, in the middle of a long Presidents Day weekend.

On Saturday, many systems that make up Roblox went down. For players, the vast majority were not able to get into the game at all, while Twitter reports indicate some were able to play, but that the game was extremely slow.

The developers know about the outages, the official Roblox status page indicates, with a "Service Disruption" message stating "We are aware of the issues with accessing Roblox. Our team is actively working on it."

The issue was acknowledged at 10:54am PST, and affects more than just players, as creators are also being impacted. According to the notice, the outage is affecting the website, iOS app, Xbox app, games, the "Studio," asset delivery, the data store, the ability for players to join games, and avatar services.

Roblox hasn't advised of how long the outage could be for, nor when it will be fixed. It has also publicly acknowledged the downtime, apologising to users on Twitter.

There is also no official word on how many players are disrupted by the downtime, but a search on Twitter for the hashtag #robloxdown shows many social media users are being vocal about it.

The downtime could be quite costly for the developer. In June 2021, it was estimated that Roblox generated some $3 million in revenue per day from the App Store alone, with the developers keeping more than $2 million after Apple takes its cut.

Despite the income, the game has been criticized for its potential exploitation of younger developers, via an unfair system that pays out only a quarter of the value of in-app purchases to creators.

Update: Roblox's status page said the outage was resolved at 1:21pm PST. The total outage period was just under two and a half hours, according to the page.