Servers randomly kicking players due to "The server has shut down"

HooferBevelops · August 30, 2024, 9:57pm

Within my game, Oaklands, I have begun receiving reports that users are randomly getting kicked for the reason of “This server has shut down (Error Code: 288).” This did not happen prior to today. We did release an update today, but none of my debug stats have indicated a loss of performance, or an increase in memory/CPU usage.

Based on the pattern of reports, the shutdowns seem to happen at different rates, one server at a time. All of these servers are less than 12 hours old as of this report, due to us doing a shutdown for all servers.

This harms our player experience greatly as the game is heavily sandbox based, so users lose lots of progress due to this occurring. When players have their items/resources off of their property, they do not get saved, so if a player is farming for resources or doing activities off of their property, they will lose that progress.

I do not know how to reproduce this issue.

(The initial drop in these graphs are due to us closing all the servers)

Expected behavior

The server should not forcefully close and kick other users.

HollywoodPLUS · August 30, 2024, 10:01pm

Is there a script in your game that shuts down a server under a specific condition (i.e. a certain amount of time)?
Are there any free models in your game that could be causing this issue?

HooferBevelops · August 30, 2024, 10:03pm

The only way we “shut down” servers is when we have a timed shutdown that teleports all the users. This is a different message than that. I don’t believe creators can forcefully shut a server down either.

We do not use free model code aside from battle-tested open-source modules.

ReallyCyan · August 31, 2024, 12:34am

Vouch on this, can confirm it is an issue that happens in two of my top experiences and could never figure out why. It is not super frequent but happens ocassionally.

Overview I posted on Guilded CFP as well: Running into strange occurence in two of our games:, random shutdowns occuring on servers, definitely happening from Roblox’s side. Could be Roblox’s automatic shutdown for serevrs passing more than a week, however the message simply states it was shutdown instead of a custom one.

HooferBevelops · August 31, 2024, 11:23am

Updating to add that I implemented some debug logging for shutdown reasons that aren’t related to having zero players. I am yet to receive any shutdown reasons for being out of memory, but I have received a few for Roblox Maintenance? All servers are less than 24 hours old as of right now.

This debug logging also is only in newer servers compared to most of the game right now.