"Data stores can only accept valid UTF-8 characters" error appearing

My game is suddenly having issues saving data to the DataStores, causing player data to be lost. This error is appearing on the Server:

DataStoreService: CantStoreValue: Cannot store Dictionary in data store. Data stores can only accept valid UTF-8 characters. API: UpdateAsync, Data Store: RESERVED_SERVERS_VERSION: 976

RESERVED_SERVERS_VERSION: 976 is my custom datastore key for holding custom reserved server data, but this is also happening to all of the other datastore keys, like player save files. This happens when :SetAsync() is called and started happening roughly 2 weeks ago, and no changes have been made to the code.

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As it says, you must be storing something that’s not a UTF-8 character. if you are using NumberValues, BoolValues, etc, that are actual instances, please check that you didn’t forget to use .Value, anyways you must have changed something by accident, maybe not within the script but possibly something with instances

This was happening for me as well, errors began occurring at ~11:30 AM ET today (~2.5 hours before this thread was posted) and appear to have subsided around ~4:30 PM ET.

I made no changes to my data storage in that time, I’ve been storing data the same way under this game for >3 years.

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please provide the code and the key/value structure you are trying to call upon SetAsync so staff could reproduce the bug

I store bool values, number values, and string values in a table. However, I notice that this only affects the datastores that are storing user-created custom strings, like save file names. It has been storing these user-generated strings the same way for several years, and only this past month began giving me this error.

This started happening on February 24th, and I have made no changes to the way data is stored.

Can you folks post the keys/values and requests with parameters that you are making so we can take a better look?