Unhappy Halloween: Gaming platform Roblox crashes

To the dismay of millions of children -- and the parents trying to keep them busy and cope with their anguish -- the popular gaming platform Roblox crashed Friday, and the company was still trying to restore service Saturday

Roblox Outage

To the dismay of millions of children -- and the parents trying to keep them busy and cope with their anguish -- the popular gaming platform Roblox crashed Friday, and the company was still trying to restore service Saturday.

“The scariest part of Halloween this year is Roblox being down,’’ lamented Twitter user @NikilisRBX.

In a statement Friday on social media, San Mateo, California-based Roblox apologized and said it was “still making progress’’ on the outage.

The cause of the problems was unclear, but Roblox said that it was “not related to any specific experiences or partnerships on the platform.’’ This was apparently meant to quash rumors that the trouble was caused by a free burrito giveaway at a digital Chipotle on the Roblox platform.

For its part, Chipotle tweeted: “Miss u Roblox.’’

On the Roblox platform, players can create their own games and play with other users. It became wildly popular after the coronavirus pandemic closed schools and kept children indoors looking for something to do.

According to numbers compiled by the social media consulting firm Backlinko, Roblox has more than 43 million active users a day (up from 14 million in 2016), 40 million games and 9.5 million developers. The most popular game on Roblox, according to Backlinko, is “Adopt Me!’’ -- which allows users to raise digital pets.