Down today, or gone for good?

Search volume for "is Roblox shutting down" is consistently high, and has been for years, during which Roblox has not come remotely close to shutting down. The same is true of Minecraft, of Discord, and of almost every large platform with a young audience.

These searches look like outage searches and are not. Someone typing "is X down" wants to know whether to wait ten minutes. Someone typing "is X shutting down" has heard that a service they use is closing forever, and wants to know whether to panic. This site answers the first question. This page is about the second, because the two get conflated constantly and the answer is almost always reassuring.

The two events could not be less alike

The crucial asymmetry: A company that is closing a service tells you. It has to. There are subscriptions to wind down, data-protection obligations to meet, refunds to process and app stores to notify. A shutdown that arrives without an announcement is vanishingly rare, and when it does happen the company has usually collapsed rather than decided.

Why the rumours start

Three triggers account for almost all of them.

A long outage

This is the one that overlaps with the subject of this site. When a platform is unreachable for several hours, a plausible-sounding explanation fills the gap, and "they are shutting down" is the most dramatic available. Roblox's three-day outage in 2021 produced exactly this, at enormous volume, for a company that was publicly listed and growing.

The tell is timing. Shutdown talk that begins during an outage and nowhere else is a story invented to explain the outage.

Layoffs or an acquisition

Both produce genuine uncertainty and both get over-read. A company cutting staff is usually trying to stay solvent, which is the opposite of closing. An acquisition sometimes does lead to a product being retired - But through an announced migration, months later, with notice.

A hoax that keeps coming back

Some shutdown rumours are simply evergreen fabrications, recycled every year or two with a new date attached. They spread fastest among younger audiences and on platforms where a screenshot travels further than a correction. The date passing changes nothing; the rumour returns with a new one.

Verifying a shutdown in two minutes

1. Check the company's own newsroom or blog. Not a news article about it - The company's own post. A real shutdown is announced by the company first, because it has to be.
2. Check the app store listing. A service winding down updates its description with a closure date, and eventually stops accepting new purchases. Both are easy to see and hard to fake.
3. Look for a specific date and a data-export path. Every genuine shutdown announcement has both. A rumour has neither, or has a date with nothing attached to it.
4. Check whether the company is publicly listed. If it is, closing a material product is disclosable. Its investor relations page will say so before a rumour does.
5. Check whether it is simply down. If the service is unreachable right now, that is far more likely to be an ordinary outage - And our status pages will tell you how long it has been going.

What a real shutdown looks like

Google Reader, Google+, Vine, Wunderlist, Skype, Windows Phone. The pattern is remarkably consistent:

• A written announcement on the company's own channels, with a firm date, typically three to twelve months out.
• New sign-ups close first, often immediately, while existing users keep working.
• An export tool, because in most jurisdictions people have a right to their own data.
• A migration suggestion, sometimes to another product from the same company.
• Read-only mode for a period before the service finally closes.

Nothing in that sequence resembles a site being unreachable this afternoon.

The variant that is not about a website at all

Worth mentioning because it shows up in the same search patterns: Some "did X shut down" queries are about physical facilities rather than services. "Did CERN shut down" is asked about the Large Hadron Collider, which genuinely does shut down - For scheduled maintenance periods lasting months, announced years in advance, and entirely unrelated to whether any website is reachable.

We do not cover those, and a status page would be the wrong answer if we did. A particle accelerator going into a planned maintenance stop is not an outage, and nothing an uptime monitor measures would tell you anything useful about it.

If it really is shutting down

Export first and read the terms second. Export tools get slower and queues get longer as the date approaches, and some have quietly stopped working before the advertised deadline.

Check what happens to anything you paid for - Remaining subscription time is usually refunded or pro-rated, and purchased content sometimes is not, which is worth knowing before rather than after. And take the read-only period seriously as a deadline rather than as extra time; it is common for exports to be unavailable during it.

Then, genuinely: Check it is not just down. Every year a substantial number of people conclude a service has closed when it was unavailable for an afternoon, and the cost of checking is about thirty seconds.