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Minecraft‘s Realms servers have been down for most of the past four days. Mojang’s official account for reporting service status updates noted that “intermittent failures or slowdowns” began on August 13th, and despite similarly intermittent reports of uptime in the days since, the servers remain inaccessible to most players today.
Realms is a paid subscription service that grants access to a private multiplayer server for Minecraft’s multiplatform Bedrock Edition. It lets between three and 10 players (depending on subscription tier) join the same Minecraft world, with the owner able to install mods from Minecraft’s paid marketplace.
“You may experience intermittent failures or slowdowns connecting to Realms. We are actively working to resolve this,” the Mojang Status account tweeted on Tuesday.
By Wednesday, the service was said to be “up and running”, albeit with some latency issues, according to the official account. Players in the replies disagreed, 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 Realms was declared to be “back up and running globally. It has been running healthy for more than the last hour. You should be able to see, manage, and play on your Realms again. Thank you again for patience as we worked through the issues.”
Within hours, another tweet noted that connectivity issues and latency had since increased again. That brings us up until this morning, around eleven hours ago, when Mojang confirmed they were “still hard at work to restore the service globally.”
I tried to connect a couple of hours ago to my own Realms account and it’s still down for me.
The connection issues seemingly began with the release of Minecraft update 1.21.20, which amended how Realms invite links work, as well as aiming to fix several Realms bugs and Minecraft bugs more generally, as per the patch notes. A second update, 1.21.21 was released the following day solely to improve “reliability of connecting to Realms.” I guess it didn’t work.
Minecraft is a true marvel, but the infrastructure that surrounds the Bedrock edition often feels like it’s held together by sticky 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 so I can play Minecraft cross-platform with my kid. I’m less willing to pay the price of £6.69 a month for a Realms server that doesn’t work for days at a time, however.