The immensely popular online game and creation system, Roblox, is back online after being down for three days. Fortunately, founder and CEO of Roblox, David Baszucki, has confirmed there will be "a policy to make our creator community economically whole as a result of this outage."
In a recent blog post sharing details of what caused the shutdown, Baszucki wrote that players began noticing issues on Thursday, October 28, but that a number of factors combined to make the issue harder to solve than the team would have liked.
"This was an especially difficult outage in that it involved a combination of several factors," Baszucki wrote. "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."
Now that normal service has been resumed, Baszucki has also assured players who financially hit that there will be full transparency going forward and that there will be a plan set in place to ensure people aren't left out of pocket.
"We will publish a post-mortem with more details once we’ve completed our analysis, along with the actions we’ll be taking to avoid such issues in the future," Baszucki wrote. "In addition, we will implement a policy to make our creator community economically whole as a result of this outage. There are more details on this to come. As part of our “Respect the Community” value, we will continue to be transparent in our post-mortem."
Making the creator community "economically whole" is incredibly important. Roblox actively encourages its young player base to make and advertise games within the platform. They are promised huge audiences and the ability to "earn serious cash", though a recent video report by People Make Games has shown that this isn't the case for most of the child developers.
Creators spend an in-game currency called Robux on the ads, but these can be bought with real cash, so a platform outage of this scale means a lot of young developers will have lost money. Given Roblox is valued at over $45 billion, it can definitely afford to reimburse its young game makers.