Today is the third time in the past week that there has been connection issues with Roblox. However, #updates:incident-reports continues to be unused, and no explanations have been given from Roblox. As a developer on Roblox, I hate being randomly stopped during development due to Roblox downtime, especially when no reason or official statement is ever given as to why the downtime occurred, and most of the time developers are not informed about it until after it has happened.
The Roblox status website was created as a tool for developers to keep informed about downtimes and status updates, however this is not the case. Take a look at Discord’s status page for example. They have detailed reports as to why they went down extending as far back as 90 days, and further! These reports are published in real-time and accurately convey why the platform went down and are consistently updated to stay accurate. This is ideal for a status site. Now look back at Roblox’s, which goes back 7 days and is not at all accurate. The history section doesn’t even include the posts that are linked above. See the difference? I look at DownDetector more than Roblox’s official status page, which for a multi-billion dollar company, is disappointing.
Perhaps the worst part through all of this is that developers have to inform their players when they themselves don’t know what’s happening. I’m not a big developer so I can’t say this for certain, but I’m sure it’s a hassle to explain to players why they can’t access their favorite games when the developer themselves isn’t entirely sure why they can’t access the game.
The most that we ever get from Roblox employees are “We’re looking into it” or “We’re aware of the issue.” This is not feasible, because this doesn’t convey to developers at all what is happening. Roblox has a major responsibility of informing the community what is going on, and at the moment it seems like that responsibility is not being fulfilled.
Developers on Roblox need to know when Roblox is having technical issues and they need to be kept informed of what is happening. A good majority of developers pay for rent and other essentials using the money they make from Roblox, and the fact that Roblox isn’t informative about these situations is probably frightening for them.
Thanks
Credit to berezaa’s post back in March of 2018 for giving me some ideas on how to format this.