Since launching Creativerse, we’ve done our best to keep unexpected downtime to a minimum. But it is a live game sitting delicately across several intricately connected cloud services.

Sometimes the bull gets in the china shop.

And sometimes that bull was a couple weeks into giving up breaking things for Lent. And occasionally that bull also gets served a pink slip and divorce papers and then happens upon your intricately delicate china shop metaphor for your live game. The rest is history.

That, dear Creatifriends, is what we refer to in the video game biz as a perfect storm. A terrible trifecta. A flotilla of flotsam. A – sorry, we’re getting carried away…by a hurricane of happenstance 😀.

First, we’d just had a scheduled downtime the morning of to make some under-the-hood improvements to our new Adventure feature (which you should really check out if you haven’t yet, by the way). Though brief, that downtime unfortunately happened right before the US-EAST-1 data center of Amazon’s S3 service, which houses the backbone of Creativerse’s data, decided to take a day off. On top of that, half our studio is in San Francisco this week attending GDC, including our community managers responsible for keeping our fans updated on social media.

The result looked something like this by yesterday afternoon…

You guys don’t know how devastated we were to hear that aliens don’t in fact float. Fortunately our community-sensitive ears could only hear the passion for our game behind the complaints, which catapulted us into action, a sight that would have resembled the oeuvre of extreme car chases in the Fast and the Furious series if Dom and Brian had been sending tweets and status updates instead of escaping from heists by driving cars through skyscrapers.

Now, to be clear, our engineers and devs were hard at work fixing things from the moment the game went down until it came back online. And fortunately, they are all active on our Steam forums, so at least our players had somewhere to stay updated.

Suddenly, amidst the chaos, Amazon’s S3 servers came back up. But Creativerse was still MIA. And we still didn’t have an ETA on coming back up. Let’s dive into why. It’s a bit technical, but it’s kind of like how you’re not supposed to push the off button on a computer without shutting down – you risk messing stuff up and losing data. The last thing we wanted was for people to come back in after waiting all day only to discover their world was unable to load or missing progress. So we took the time necessary to clean things up and make sure everything was in working order.

Finally, after 8 hours and approximately 137 cups of coffee, we brought Creativerse back online to much rejoicing. Things have been running smoothly since. But we know how painful it can be to go that long without having access to a game like Creativerse, where so many of you have worlds and builds you’ve spent countless hours pouring your heart and soul into.

Fortunately, we learn something every time an unexpected outage happens, which allows us to improve our service and make the game even more bull-proof. In my case, I’ll make sure more people can cover for us on social media when we’re out of the office.

As our way of saying “sorry the internet broke yesterday”, we’ve got a goodie bag of weird, fun and semi-helpful stuff ’n things you can claim in the game right now. Use the code “BULLPROOF” in our store to get it.

Thanks to all our players for their patience, understanding, and most of all for being such awesome, passionate fans of the game!

–PlayfulDavid