Longest Blackout in History of VRChat

“VRChat servers tonight.” Screenshot and caption made by Tupper.

This week was full of incidents caused by the growth of VRChat due to influence of a problematic meme. One of the most unfortunate surprises we encountered was the longest server blackout that lasted about 7 hours. Even though we had 15,084 concurrent users online before, the incident happened two days after that, when we reached 13,726.

During the blackout, Gallium said, “The VRChat team are working on server improvement to handle the increased load. It's been very sudden, so please be patient while they whip the server gerbils into action.” Later, the servers got back up, although we experienced at least one more blackout after that.

Besides that, VR Pill announced that VRChat Discord server reached 10 thousand active users, “Looks like we hit the Discord cap of 10,000 active online members again. We have contacting Discord about this and are waiting for the cap to be raised.”

As far as we know, the cap has been raised, and we are getting more and more new users, so the VRChat developer team wrote an open letter to the community with good a advice for new users, as well as their personal thoughts on the future of VRChat. To read the letter, you may scan the QR code.

Right now, VRChat is about to become one of the top 40 most played games by playtime on Steam, which sounds surreal for a 3-year-old platform that used to have no more than 200 users online only several months ago.

With servers being pushed to their limits, as well as blackouts happening occasionally, instead of launching VRChat, we suggest checking out YouTube and Twitch streamers to reduce the number of concurrent users during these “dark times.” Some of the greatest streamers have already been mentioned in the open letter by the developers.

However, if you’re going to stay in VRChat anyway, make sure you read the latest information in a new channel called “Server-Status” that’s now being used to share the details about our servers.