Minecraft Realms servers have been down for most of the past four days. Mojang’s official service status update reporting account noted that “intermittent crashes or slowdowns” began on August 13, and despite similarly intermittent uptime reports in the days since, the servers remain unavailable to most players.
Realms is a paid subscription service that provides access to a private multiplayer server for the cross-platform Bedrock edition of Minecraft. It allows three to ten players (depending on the subscription level) to join the same Minecraft world, and the owner can install mods from the paid Minecraft store.
“You may experience occasional crashes or slowdowns when connecting to Realms. We are actively working to resolve this issue” – Mojang Status Account tweeted on Tuesday.
According to the official report, the service was reportedly “up and running” on Wednesday, albeit with some latency issues. Players responded with disagreements, with hundreds noting that they were still unable to play. There were further statements that the team was continuing to work on the issues until yesterday, when it was announced that Realms was “back up and running globally. It has been running healthily for over an hour. You should be able to see, manage, and play your Realms again. Thanks again for your patience as we work through the issues.”
Within hours, another tweet noted that connectivity issues and lag had since gotten worse again. That brings us to this morning, about eleven hours ago, when Mojang confirmed that they were “still working hard to restore service worldwide.”
I tried connecting to my Realms account a few hours ago and still can’t.
The connection issues apparently started with the release of Minecraft update 1.21.20, which changed the way Realms invite links work, as well as aimed to fix several Realms and Minecraft bugs in general, according to patch notesThe second update, 1.21.21, was released the following day for the sole purpose of improving “reliability of connecting to Realms”. I don’t think it worked.
Minecraft is a marvel, but the infrastructure surrounding Bedrock Edition often feels like it’s been held together by duct tape and greed. I hate every second I have to spend managing my Realms account, and yet it’s a price I’m willing to pay to be able to play Minecraft on multiple platforms with my child. However, I’m not willing to pay the price of £6.69 a month for a Realms server that’s down for days.
