SUMMARY
- Thousands of Minecraft players reported being unable to join Realms, with error codes 502 and 504 signaling server gateway and timeout issues.
- The outage disrupted gameplay globally, with reports concentrated in the United States but also extending to other regions.
- Mojang Studios has not yet provided a detailed explanation for the outage or a full timeline for service restoration.
Minecraft Realms, the subscription based service that allows players to create private online worlds, experienced widespread outages across the United States on Saturday, Feb. 7, leaving thousands of users unable to access their games.
Error messages including “Error 502” and “Error 504” were widely reported, according to Downdetector and other service monitoring platforms.
The disruption began around 2:41 pm Eastern Time, when players across the United States reported difficulties joining Realms, logging into servers, and loading worlds.
Social media platforms quickly filled with complaints from frustrated users, some demanding refunds for repeated service interruptions.
Realms is a key component of Minecraft’s online ecosystem, providing players a persistent, cloud hosted environment for multiplayer gaming.
The outage affected both Bedrock and Java editions, leaving subscribers temporarily unable to connect to private worlds hosted on Microsoft’s infrastructure.
Players reported widespread loading failures, login errors, and disconnections during peak afternoon hours.
Error 502 typically occurs when a server receives an invalid response from an upstream server, while error 504 indicates a gateway timeout, suggesting delayed responses from the network or backend services.
“Such errors often point to issues in the cloud infrastructure that supports online gaming,” said Dr. Rachel Mills, a senior researcher at the Center for Distributed Computing.
“When multiple subsystems authentication, matchmaking, routing are affected, users can experience cascading failures like those reported on Saturday.”
Jonathan Greer, network reliability engineer at CloudOps Insights, added, “The pattern of user complaints suggests that the disruption may involve global routing or load balancing systems rather than isolated server problems.”
Minecraft, owned by Microsoft, has positioned Realms as a premium subscription service for players seeking always online private worlds without managing their own servers.
While generally stable, Realms has experienced multiple service interruptions in recent months, highlighting the challenges of maintaining consistent performance across a global cloud infrastructure.
By Sunday, Feb. reports indicated that access to Realms was gradually returning to normal, although some players continued to experience slow load times.
Mojang has not provided a public update on the cause of the outage or measures to prevent similar disruptions in the future.
The incident underscores the complexity of maintaining large scale cloud hosted gaming services and the potential impact on global player communities when technical issues arise.
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