My game is getting killed by bugged, empty servers getting stuck and preventing people from joining

Game link: Roblox High School [Legacy] - Roblox

Last night between 12:00 AM - 1:00 AM EST, I started receiving reports that people were experiencing the “ID=17” connection error when trying to join my game. I went through the server list and saw that there were dozens of bugged, empty servers that were not getting shut down and would disconnect anyone who tried to join them. People could join fine if they selected a server with players already in it, but the game’s player count quickly tanked as more and more servers became bugged, going down to nearly 700 on a Saturday night. There were no other games experiencing this issue. I had to shut down all of the servers myself to temporarily fix the problem.

Today at 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM EST, the same issue started happening again.

(click to view gif)

I didn’t report it the first time since I thought it was just a one time glitch, but now it’s showing signs of appearing again and again. I have absolutely no idea what could be going on here - I haven’t made any changes to my game that could suddenly start causing this out of nowhere. I don’t know if ROBLOX has any logs that could provide insight on what may be happening with these servers.

Oddly enough, there is only a visible drop in PC, tablet, and mobile players. Xbox servers appear completely unaffected, which makes me more convinced that it’s unrelated to my game’s code.

Hourly developer stats showing the drops:

Hopefully I can get some help on this issue, because I have no way of knowing what’s going on here.

1 Like

This has happened twice in the Audio Visualizer place.

At first I thought it was an issue with the game.OnClose event but after removing it still persists occasionally.

Dec 4:

It would return the ID 17 error whenever you would try to connect to the game via play or join server