Lack of communication with developers during critical incidents

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#1

Now that the 70+ hour outage is over, we should discuss Roblox’s communication with its developers during these types of disaster scenarios and their overall preparedness for them. The silence during this outage shines a bad light on Roblox’s leadership, and I am in no way blaming the engineers working around the clock to solve it.

While I hope a detailed postmortem comes about what happened and how Roblox will make sure it doesn’t happen again, this post focuses on Roblox’s communication during disaster scenarios and prolonged outages in general.

Throughout this two-day outage, Roblox has said nothing of significant value to its developers. We were left entirely in the dark about potential damage to our game and how to communicate it with our own players. I cannot emphasise enough how vital consistent and transparent communication with developers is. Roblox is a symbiosis; Developers make the content, and Roblox provides the services. Both are required for the platform to be relevant. When Roblox cannot provide services to its users and does not communicate closely with its developers why, there is not much of a ‘symbiosis’ to speak of.

Even if it doesn’t seem like there is much information to share, a simple statement saying, “It’s a complicated problem, we don’t know how long it will take to fix, but we are actively working on it.” can be valuable information to us. As developers, it’s hugely concerning to be left in the dark for multiple days during a scenario like this. The silence speaks volumes about how prepared Roblox is for these situations and how they seem to value developers as we work through the downtime ourselves.

Ongoing communication is essential. As more information comes to light, sharing information such as “This will probably take a day to resolve.” is extremely useful to developers and studios whose incomes rely heavily on this platform being operational.

I want to finish this thread open-ended so that other developers can add their thoughts and feelings about how this outage affected them or their studio.

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#2

As an extension of the lack of information or statements during the outage, I saw many users and even developers speculating about what was taking Roblox so long. There were even some wild theories involving Facebook’s unrelated rebranding. I believe that better communication can help prevent users from spreading misinformation and/or encouraging a hostile attitude towards Roblox.

Even if the information we are given during the diagnosis process is very limited due to the lack of available information, this will at least discourage users from harassing employees for details due to the lack of information, which I think is a win-win for everyone involved.

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#3

This was the biggest issue for me. Even a statement saying “We’re not sure what the cause is, and we have no estimates for how long this will take to fix”, or “This issue will likely not be fixed for a few days” would be highly beneficial to folks who rely on this platform to run their businesses, get income, and make marketing decisions. Having almost 0 communication during the incident is quite frustrating.

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