Roblox Goes Down, Forcing Children Outside for Halloween

This weekend, children around the country began acting strange, as though they were emerging from a trance. They moped around their houses. They started hanging out with their parents. They powered up long-neglected electronics in search of entertainment. Some even — gasp! — went outside.

The culprit for their spooky behavior? Roblox, or the lack of it.

Roblox, the gaming platform that is wildly popular among children, especially those from 9 to 12 years old, was knocked offline starting Thursday afternoon. Attempts to use the website resulted only in a message: “We’re making things more awesome. Be back soon.”

On Sunday morning, Roblox’s official Twitter account wrote that the company had identified the “root cause and solution” and was working to restore the platform. Hours later, the company tweeted that it was “back online everywhere!”

The platform, a blocky, colorful online universe that hosts millions of unique games created by independent developers — some who are young adults or even teenagers themselves — attracts more than 43 million players every day. So social media was soon filled with horrified children who could not log in and frustrated parents demanding answers.

“My god daughter outside playing with a soccer ball had me thinking the world was ending,” one person tweeted. “Turns out Roblox down.”

A Roblox spokesman referred to the company’s tweets but did not comment further. The company also shot down a viral rumor that a Chipotle promotion that began shortly before the outage had caused the platform to crash. Roblox tweeted on Friday that “this outage was not related to any specific experiences or partnerships on the platform.”

In the meantime, parents were left to cope with stressed-out children. In Aliso Viejo, Calif., Harper Deal, 9, has been watching television, scrolling through TikTok and decorating her house for Halloween. She usually plays Roblox with her cousin who lives out of state.

“When Roblox shut down, I haven’t really talked to her that much,” Harper said in an interview, before rushing to her room to check again if the platform was back online. “I don’t know what to do.”

Megan Letter, a YouTube host and Roblox game developer, said she had been getting frantic tweets from children wondering whether the platform would ever return.

“There is some panic, but that’s normal with children,” she said. “Your whole life is Roblox; that’s all you know. You live, eat, breathe Roblox, so all of the sudden when it’s taken out of your routine, it’s a little bit stressful.”

In Bethesda, Md., 13-year-old Garvey Mortley was also trying to find a way to fill the time.

“I didn’t really have any Halloween plans before — my only plans were to play Roblox, so that kind of got ruined,” she said.

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