Minecraft's multiplayer Realms servers were down after the last patch three days ago

Minecraft's Realms servers have been down for most of the past four days. The official account Mojang uses to report service status updates says that “intermittent failures or slowdowns” began on August 13, and despite similar intermittent reports of uptime since then, the servers are still inaccessible to most players today.

Realms is a paid subscription service that provides access to a dedicated multiplayer server for Minecraft's cross-platform Bedrock Edition. It allows three to 10 players (depending on subscription tier) to join the same Minecraft world, and the owner can install mods from Minecraft's paid marketplace.

“You may experience intermittent crashes or slowdowns when connecting to Realms. We're actively working to resolve this,” the Mojang Status account tweeted on Tuesday.

On Wednesday, the official account said the service was “up and running,” albeit with some lag issues. Players in the replies disagreed, with hundreds still saying they were unable to play. There was further clarification that the team continued to work on the issues until yesterday when Realms was announced as “globally back up and running.” “It's been working healthily for the last hour or so. You should be able to see, manage, and play on your Realms again. Thanks again for your patience while we work on resolving the issues.”

Within hours, another tweet noted that the connection issues and lag had increased again. This brings us to this morning, about eleven hours ago, when Mojang confirmed that they were “still working hard to restore service globally.”

I tried connecting to my own Realms account a few hours ago and it's still down.

The connection issues started with the release of Minecraft update 1.21. 20, which, according to the patch notes, changed how Realms invite links worked and also aimed to fix several Realms bugs and Minecraft bugs more generally. A second update, 1.21. 21, was released the following day, solely to improve the “reliability of connecting to Realms.” I guess it didn't work.

Minecraft is a true marvel, but the infrastructure surrounding Bedrock’s version often feels like it’s held together by duct tape and greed. I hate every second I spend managing my Realms account, but it’s a price I’m willing to pay to be able to play Minecraft cross-platform with my kid. But I’m less willing to pay the £6.69 a month price for a Realms server that’s down for days on end.

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