Roblox’s Ill-Timed Outage; More on Meta

While techies around the world spent the weekend mulling over Facebook’s new name, the company that arguably is the closest to having a functioning metaverse was in a major bind. Roblox, the beloved-by-kids game platform with over 43 million daily active users, suffered a complete outage lasting from Thursday afternoon to late Sunday.

The days-long predicament serves as a reminder that beneath all the hype, the metaverse as it exists today is built on problem-laden infrastructure. On Sunday, Roblox CEO David Baszucki offered an explanation for the extended outage—"growth in the number of servers in" Roblox’s datacenters, with a "subtle" backend bug serving as the spark to the flame.