What Happened to Roblox on October 31, 2021? Outage Explained

To this day, many players are unaware of what happened to Roblox on October 31. If you’re one of them, here you’ll find all the details of the infamous burrito incident.

Roblox, a popular online platform where players create their avatars and participate in many different games with wildly different themes, experienced a significant outage that lasted for 72 hours. This event, which affected millions of users and developers, has become one of the most well-known incidents in Roblox’s history.

Timeline of Roblox’s Outage

• 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.

What Caused the Outage?

According to the developers, the outage was caused by an internal system issue that happened during routine maintenance. The company shared a very detailed and technical post explaining the root cause of the problem, what they did to fix it, and what they would do to prevent something like that from happening again. They were specifically worried about player data and promised monetary compensation to those affected by the outage.

Related: Official Five Nights at Freddy’s Roblox Experience Taken Down Two Hours After Release

The Burrito Incident Rumor

The system issue that caused the three-day-long outage happened to coincide with when Chipotle promoted a game that could make players acquire a code that could be exchanged for a real burrito. However, Roblox was very quick to deny any connection. They stated that the issue was not caused by any of their partnerships or any of their games. Later, they addressed the problem by specifying what was the issue and clearing all the doubts that players might have had.

After things returned to normal, Roblox provided in-game currency for all players that were affected by the outage. This act was very well received by the Roblox community. Although this event is often mentioned as a sort of apocalyptic era, it was just a three-day-long downtime. However, considering the number of players that Roblox has, it makes sense that this 72-hour outage would become so infamous.