What happened on October 31, 2021, with Roblox? An explanation of the outage

 Jul 24, 2024

Many gamers are still in the dark about what occurred to Roblox on October 31st. If you belong to that group, you may get all the information on the notorious burrito incident right here.

There was a major outage on Roblox, a well-known online gaming site where users could create their own avatars and play a wide variety of games with absurdly varied themes, for sixty-two hours. This episode has become one of the most well-known in Roblox's history, affecting millions of players and developers.

The Roblox Outage Timeline

  • October 28, 2021: Roblox began to experience several issues around 5 p.m. Players started noticing that the website was slow, some were not able to log in, and some reported that games were acting oddly. Most pages would redirect visitors to an Error 400 Bad Request page.
  • October 29, 2021: The website was completely closed at 11 a.m., 18 hours after the malfunctions started. This was the first time since 2019 that Roblox’s website was completely closed for everybody, besides the developers. Roblox was quick to deny rumors that this issue was caused by any new game or partnership.
  • October 31, 2021: The website started to come back at 8 a.m. Roblox had announced a few hours earlier that they had encountered the root cause of the issue and figured out how to solve it. By 5:45 p.m., about 70 to 72 hours after the incident started, the Roblox website was completely functional and players were able to return to their hobby.

Why Was the Outage Caused?

The developers claim that an internal system problem that arose during standard maintenance was the cause of the outage. The business published a very thorough and technical article outlining the underlying cause of the issue, the steps taken to resolve it, and the steps they will do to ensure that it doesn't happen again. They pledged financial compensation to anybody impacted by the outage and expressed particular concern regarding player data.

Similar: Two hours after its release, the official Five Nights at Freddy's Roblox experience was taken down.

The Rumor of the Burrito Incident

Roblox-Chitople-Burrito
Chipotle image

The three-day outage was triggered by a system fault that occurred at the same time that Chipotle was promoting a game that required participants to get a code that could be traded for a real burrito. Roblox, however, quickly refused to acknowledge any relationship. They claimed that none of their games or collaborations were the source of the problem. Subsequently, they resolved the matter by explaining the nature of the situation and dispelling any uncertainties that the participants may have had.

Roblox gave all players impacted by the outage in-game money once things were back to normal. The Roblox community reacted favorably to this action. It is a common misconception that this event marked the end of the world, however it was just a three-day period of inactivity. But it seems natural that this 72-hour outage would become so well-known given the amount of Roblox users.