Server blackout



A server blackout is the unexpected crash of a server, typically resulting in all players being logged out for an extended period of time. Those listed on this page are events which affected most, if not all, game servers and may have affected other RuneScape facilities such as the forums and main website.

Server blackouts are generally caused by a technical failure at Jagex and as such players can do nothing but wait until the problem is fixed. In some cases, a rollback is necessary. A rollback is an operation the database in the servers are returned to a previous state. On rare occasions where a rollback is performed, any changes that occurred between the crash and the previous state is lost. This include gained experience, trade transactions, etc.

During a server blackout, worlds on the select screen are listed as saying the words, OFFLINE capitalised, rather than being offline or having a specific number. This occurs because when a server is deliberately taken offline, the game screen is changed to reflect this. However on an unexpected crash, the login server simply assumes that nobody is connected to that server.

In the following section, each blackout that has occurred during the history of RuneScape is documented, along the reasons given for the blackout. All times are noted in UTC, unless otherwise stated. (Note that this is one hour behind British Summer Time, or BST, during the summer due to daylight savings.)

First server blackout
The first server blackout of 2007 was a pair of events that happened on 2 and 3 June 2007 in which all RuneScape servers were shut down for several hours. RSC servers remained online however, and received a flood of RS2 players, reaching 1,000 logged-in on both RSC worlds combined.

When the servers went back online, players were confused and were unsure about why this happened. Since it was the first blackout many players had encountered, rumours that a hacker manipulated the servers were everywhere. A group of players in World 66 in Falador lied that the Kalphite Queen appeared in Falador and when players stormed into Falador, a group of mages attempted to telegroup players to the Ice Plateau in level 50 Wilderness. Many lower-levelled players who were unaware that the Ice Plateau was located in deep Wilderness accepted the teleother and were killed. This event was a classic example of luring.

Second server blackout
The second server blackout of 2007 occurred on 15 July 2007. It caused players to lose what they had done in the past hour thus causing several rants and riots in game, most notably the riot in World 66 in Falador. Jagex moderators stated on the forums that this was due to a Jagex Internet Server Provider (ISP) outage, and that they would take steps to decrease the chance of this occurring in the future, as it was the second blackout within two months.

Third server blackout
The third server blackout of 2007 occurred starting at 01:28 UTC and ending at 04:33 on 19 November 2007. It was caused by a hardware failure at Jagex's main hosting facility. For unknown reasons, the router/firewall malfunctioned and stopped forwarding traffic to the internet.

RuneScape 2, including the German beta version, as well as all other aspects of RuneScape which required logging-in such as the forums and account management went offline. The only exception being RuneScape Classic. The Friends List server went down approximately half an hour before the servers blacked out. Shortly after the servers came back on, a riot broke out in World 66. Mod Zach showed up to talk to players.

As with all other riots, players congregated in Falador centre shouting phrases such as, "Shave the whales", "Ice me", "Jagex failed", along with many other phrases from previous riots. The Retribution prayer was also seen during this riot; players would activate the prayer to show their anger with Jagex. The riot continued in the Frozen Waste Plateau to the western side of Gielinor.

First server blackout
The first server blackout of 2008 occurred around 18:50 UTC on 17 January 2008. The official forums and other parts of the website went offline. The servers came back on at around 19:05. The cause of this blackout is unknown.

Second server blackout
The second server blackout of 2008 occurred only two days after the first blackout of 2008 at about 05:30 UTC on 19 January 2008. All players were logged-off the servers, although the login servers were down for some time before. Website features were also offline, similar to other blackouts that have occurred in the past. This blackout was short-lived, lasting only 30 minutes as the servers came online again at about 06:00 UTC.

Third server blackout
The third server blackout of 2008 occurred at about 15:25 UTC on Friday, 13 June 2008 (Friday the 13th). World 119 was the first server to go offline. The login servers went down at 15:25, and at about 15:34, all players were logged-off from the worlds.

During much of the blackout, the website's main page indicated that there were still 347 people playing the game, despite the fact that on the world selection list, all servers were listed as having zero players. This appeared to have been fixed at about 17:00. It was apparent that this was a bug, as there were not actually any players on the servers. The General and Tech Support forums user numbers went up and Jagex moderators (mainly Mod Emilee), forum moderators, and helpful players congregated, helping out the confused players. Rumours began of a second RuneScape 666 (RuneScape 666 is when a glitch occurs, allowing many people to attack each other in a non-attack area.), which was of course not true.

This blackout also affected FunOrb, being the first blackout since its launch. Most players were unable to play games, although some were able to login despite the blackout. Website features and the forums were also disabled as a result.

At about 17:00 UTC, the following was announced on the RuneScape main page:

By 17:30, all world servers were back online, with the exception of World 119 being back online a while later after some maintenance work.

Fourth server blackout
The fourth server blackout of 2008 occurred at 13:55 UTC on Tuesday, 1 July 2008. Free servers, especially those which were British, crashed first. This was possibly due to Jagex's headquarters being located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. Shortly after, every other server blacked out. Evidence suggests that this blackout resulted from the RuneScape High Detail update, which was introduced only 20 minutes beforehand.

At 14:07 on the same day, the rants forum had 383 active users and peaked at 452 users at 14:14. The number of users fell to 180 at 20:25.

The servers were brought back online at approximately 14:25 the same day. The following was announced on the RuneScape main page:

Fifth server blackout


The fifth server blackout of 2008 occurred after a system update around 14:00 UTC on Thursday, 17 July 2008. The world selection screen showed as all worlds, either members or free-to-play, as being offline. No announcement was made as to what caused this blackout.

Some world servers started to be back online at around 14:13 and the blackout lasted only 13 minutes.

Sixth server blackout
The sixth server blackout of 2008 occurred at on 19:13 UTC on 23 October 2008. The servers were partly back online at 19:22, becoming the shortest blackout ever and eventually were fully running a short while later. This blackout was originally believed to be due to the 2008 Hallowe'en event update, as evidence suggests that this blackout is similar to the blackout that occurred after the RuneScape High Detail update.

First server blackout
The first server blackout of 2009 occurred on 25 February 2009. Many members-only and free-to-play worlds worldwide (Worlds 110, 111, 112, 115, 49, 81, and 50) went offline at around 23:00 UTC, and those worlds which remained logged-out hundreds of players soon after. This blackout was caused by a mass bug which was exploited by players using the Public chat interface.

Second server blackout
The second server blackout of 2009 occurred on Tuesday, 17 March 2009, after The Chosen Commander was released. Servers began crashing one-by-one, and completely went offline at around 14:04 UTC.

After losing connection with an offline server, players experienced problems with being unable to log into another server, receiving the message "Your account has not logged out from its last session. Try again in a few minutes." even after 10 minutes or more had elapsed.

Many Jagex Moderators had claimed in the RuneScape forums that the blackout could never last more than 10–30 minutes, but this was not the case as the blackout lasted approximately 50 minutes (14:04–14:54 UTC). Popular servers in America and Canada (including Worlds 1 and 2) remained offline until 16:13.

Third server blackout
The third server blackout of 2009 occurred on Sunday, 14 June 2009 at 20:30 when a few worlds were reported to go offline. Jagex fixed the blackout 10 minutes later.

Fourth server blackout
The fourth server blackout of 2009 (though technically not a blackout) occurred only two days after the third on Tuesday, 16 June 2009. At about 15:40 UTC, all European servers were shut down, and almost 4 hours later, the European servers were back online.

Around about the time of the blackout, a Jagex Moderator started a new thread on RuneScape Forums.

Fifth server blackout


The fifth server blackout of 2009 occurred on Thursday, 16 July 2009. At 21:16 UTC, Mod Gibson issued an announcement on the RuneScape Tech Support Forum regarding a crash of one of the American servers. Over the next several hours, the problem grew: by 01:06 UTC on Friday, 17 July, 20 American servers (1, 2, 7-9, 21, 22, 26-32, 42, 47, 48, 56, 70, and 100) had gone offline during play, rendering the accounts of players in those worlds inaccessible for over an hour. Some players subsequently reported experiencing a rollback of 15 minutes to an hour while others reported experiencing no such effect. In a press release issued shortly afterwards, Jagex CEO Mark Gerhard blamed the interruption on problems with an ISP contracted by Jagex to provide services in the United States:

Although this statement was obviously issued to calm down frustrated players and help cut down on some of the confusion that was taking place, it actually backfired on Jagex and ended up causing more frustration than there had been previously. Angry players were filling the Forums with rants claiming that since Jagex was seeking damages, and since the players were paying to be able to play and yet were not able to, they should receive compensation credits for lost time due to these outages. However, Jagex never refunded any of the lost members credits.

Service was restored to two servers (1 and 2) later that day, but Jagex took down 19 additional NaviSite-run servers, including 4 serving Canada, due to concerns about reliability:

In a later Tech Support Forum post, the Jagex CEO reported that "the problem was caused by the ISP's routers being overloaded. It was not a problem with our own systems, or with us having inadequate bandwidth." Service was eventually restored sometime between 7:37 and 11:37 UTC on 18 July 2009.

Sixth server blackout
The sixth server blackout of 2009 occurred on Tuesday, 28 July 2009 at 17:00 UTC and lasted for around 20 minutes. The server blackout included servers in Sweden, Mexico, India, and many others. Although no official statement was made towards the blackout, there was no warning prior to the blackout and all players on the affected worlds disconnected from RuneScape. Some people involved in the disconnection could not log back into RuneScape as the game was already notifying them of their accounts being online. Service was restored around 2 hours later for all of the affected servers.

Seventh server blackout
The seventh server blackout of 2009 occurred on Thursday, 20 August 2009 at 01:07 UTC and lasted for around 5 minutes. The server blackout included all European servers including the UK, Sweden, France, Germany and the Netherlands. No official statement was made towards the blackout yet there was no warning prior to the blackout either and all players on the effected worlds disconnected from RuneScape. Some people involved in the disconnection could not log back onto RuneScape as the game server was notifying them of their accounts being online. This was mainly caused by the person logging onto the server their account had crashed on. Service was restored minutes after the crash.

First server blackout
The first blackout of 2010 occurred on Thursday, 11 January 2010 at approximately 00:58 UTC. This blackout affected worlds: 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159.

There was not much lag when it went offline.

Second server blackout


The Second blackout of 2010 occurred on Thursday, 21 January 2010 at approximately 00:20 UTC, this blackout affected Canadian worlds 154, 155, and 157, Mexican world 156, and worlds 158 and 159. As of approximately 1:00 UTC, accounts that were logged into the affected worlds are free to log in. If a player was in a clan chat in one of the affected worlds while the blackout was in effect, their name would remain there as 'ghosts' until the player logged into a different world. Due to this blackout, all accounts that had been playing on these worlds at the time had a rollback, anywhere from 5–30 minutes.

This blackout lasted approximately an hour.

Third server blackout
The third server blackout occurred on Wednesday, 14 April (2 days after the release of Dungeoneering), at or around 17:47 (UTC). This blackout was forced by Jagex in order to fix a major glitch with runecrafting in Dungeoneering in which players were gaining massively inflated experience for crafting runes. Jagex originally planned to give 2 exp per rune, but an unknown glitch caused some people to gain 2000 exp per rune imbued. Thousands of posts were posted on official forums. Although Jagex claimed the rollback should be no more than 30 minutes worth, some players are saying that they have been rolled back up to 14 hours. For a brief period of time, the highscores sent players levels back to 1:00 am in the morning, whilist Mod Nexus stated they'll be updated to 17:23 pm once players log back in. The Adventurer's logs also shut down. The server was back up at 19:54 UTC.

Fourth server blackout
The Fourth server blackout of 2010 occurred on Wednesday, 9 June at 12:00 (UTC). Several worlds went offline. These were 2, 6, 18, 20, 29, 31, 33, 39, 65, 78, 84, 90, 91, 99, 100, 117, 136, 144, 156, 165, 167, 171 and 172.

Fifth server blackout
The Fifth server blackout of 2010 occurred at Thursday, 22 July. The friends and ignore list, as well as clan chats, were inaccessible for most players and some of the sites of RuneScape was shut down, including the forums, hiscores and Adventurer logs. Anybody who attempted to add a name to their friends or ignore list got a server busy message, and a similar message was shown for entering some clans.

Sixth server blackout
The sixth server blackout of 2010 occurred at Wednesday, 4 August. Anyone who tried to login during the blackout got the message: Unable to connect: Login server offline. The blackout lasted over 1 hour and 15 minutes.

Seventh server blackout
The seventh server blackout of 2010 occurred at Tuesday 21 September. It happened immediately after the new Quest; Gunnars Ground was released, the worlds that were affected are; 10,51,52,54,71,105,148 and 151.

Eighth server blackout
The eighth server blackout of 2010 occurred at Thursday 14 October. It affected worlds 49 and 50.

Ninth server blackout
The ninth server blackout of 2010 began on 25 October. Most worlds are affected. Jagex released an update to fix the problem but it made disconnects occur more frequently.

Tenth server blackout
The tenth server blackout of 2010 began on 4 November at around 8:30 AM (UTC). It was documented in a Jagex update released the day before.

First server blackout
The first server blackout of 2011 happened on 17 January at 4:20 PM (UTC). The login servers went down just after the Hati Wolf update. Players could still log into forums, but when trying to log into the game would get a message saying that their password was invalid or error connecting to server. It came back online a few minutes later.

Second server blackout
The second server blackout of 2011 happened on 9 February around 16:37 PM (UTC). The login servers went down, players could still log into forums, but when trying to log into the game would get a message saying that their password was invalid or error connecting to server. Many players posted on the forums, and Mod Dowd reacted very quickly. The game crashed again at 17:06, and the game wasn't fixed until at least 17:50.

Third server blackout

 * All times mentioned are in UTC.

The third server blackout of 2011 happened on 11 April around 16:45. The forums went down, friends list servers were unable to connect to the game and the Grand Exchange servers also refused to connect or were extremely lagged in some cases. Some players were still able to connect to those three without problems, but shortly thereafter problems arose for those too. Many players were unable to login while others were locked into the game and unable to log off. At the time of the blackout approximately 188,000 players were logged in and at 19:20 this number dropped to 2 players online. At around 19:20 Jagex attempted to reboot the game. At 19:55 servers began to start back up, but only for approximately 5,000 people. A few minutes later they went back down. Around 20:20 (UTC) the servers were down for most players, yet "there are currently 0 people online," was still shown. At about the same time, the forums and other website services came back online.

This has been the biggest Server blackout so far. All of Jagex's servers were shutdown and nobody was able to connect to RuneScape Classic, War of Legends, Funorb and even Stellardawn servers. Many of the services on the runescape.com site were unavailable too, including hiscores, forums, news, the Grand Exchange database and most other services on Jagex sites.

Mod Scorpion posted on Facebook on the Runescape Fan Page that the Jagex team was aware the game was down and was working to fix it. A later post then said that changes would not be lost for RuneScape players who get disconnected and encouraged players who were in game to continue playing. Players were also being kept up to date and informed about the issue via RuneScape's Twitter page by Mod Knox and Mod Scorpion. Mod Scorpion's first post about this went up on Facebook at 16:13. Later RuneScape Mod Zach posted on Facebook that Jagex were having hosting issues with their core hosting provider.

At 20:13 Mod Knox stated via Twitter that they had leads towards the problem of the blackout.

Players became able to log back into Runescape at roughly 20:50.

Jagex added the following post to the main page of the website at 20:26:

"Due to an issue with our core infrastructure, the RuneScape game client and certain website features are currently unavailable. We are taking steps to rectify this issue as quickly as possible, and the game and all website features should be back in full working order over the coming hours. Some profile data may have been lost during this time. At the moment we are NOT planning a roll back."

There is a slight contradiction made by Jagex here, since on the fourm post by Mod Chrisso, it says that "All items both in your inventory and within your bank will also have been entirely secure during this time.", where as on the post on the main page, the words, "Some profile data may have been lost during this time." were used.

At 21:53 The servers were up and running.