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Just this past weekend, social and gaming platform Roblox saw a peak of 30.6 million concurrently active players, the company announced Tuesday. One game in particularthe record-breaking viral gardening sim Grow a Gardendrew a peak of 21.6 million concurrent players. While previous blockbuster games from Fortnite to World of Warcraft primarily run on servers managed by their own developers and publishers, Roblox is distinctive in that its games and experiences are created by third-party developers. And those developers are free to update and tweak their game code at any timewith Roblox’s servers expected to manage the traffic load, even seamlessly updating the experience for players already logged in. “Most of us computer scientists were taught that you’d never publish your entire code in one go, and you do it when your traffic is low,” says Anupam Singh, senior vice president of engineering at Roblox. “In our case, it’s almost the opposite.” That’s because preannounced updates to big-name games naturally draw crowds of players, and no gamer wants to be stuck on an old version of the software in an era when screenshots rapidly circulate via group chat and social media. And since Roblox tries to avoid restricting how experienced creators run their games and when they can deploy them, game code, images, and other assets need to be sent quickly and simultaneously to Roblox’s content distribution network and edge servers as soon as they’re ready to go and certified to meet Roblox content standards. It’s one of several challenges that have led Roblox’s engineering team to develop a sophisticated system of capacity and resilience planning, rigorous testing, and on-call engineering staffing for weekends, when players flock to the platform in droves. The company has a network of 24 edge data centers around the world, handling much of the game experience. When players click a play button to launch a specific game, they’re connected to the most appropriate data center by an algorithm that can take into effect factors like which server their friends are playing on, their geographic location relative to the servers, and connection speed between the player’s device and each server. The system as a whole sometimes considers up to 4 billion combinations of players and servers per second, and the company has for years been optimizing the process with an ultimate goal of being able to handle 10 million players joining games in a period of just 10 seconds. After all, today’s internet users are no longer used to loading delays in launching new content, especially not the younger users who make up many of Roblox’s core audience. “We all remember the time when you just assumed that a little buffering is okay,” Singh says. “But there’s an entire generation of users who don’t think buffering happens on the internet.” Those edge servers, plus additional cloud computing capacity that can be spun up to meet weekend demand, are connected to a pair of core data centers that manage services like the Roblox website, content filtering and recommendation algorithms, as well as the game publishing system. The edge servers connect to those core servers via a global private network, with redundant bandwidth available in case it’s necessary. “I’ve learned in this job that cable being cut is a very regular occurrence,” Singh says. During those busy weekends, there’s a rotating schedule of on-call engineers ready to respond to any incidents. Even C-suite executives participate, Singh says, with on-call workers expected to have a Roblox-approved computer and a good internet connection during those shifts. When the unexpected occurs, an incident manager leads the response, able to command everyone (including executives); infrastructure like AI transcription is in place for any necessary calls. The company strives to avoid casting blame to get incidents resolved properly and quickly, with incident managers empowered to approve resources as necessary to get the job done. “The on-call has the ability to say, Okay, give them 2,000 more servers, if that’s what’s needed right now, Singh says. If a problem does pop up that limits capacity, the company has systems in place to gracefully scale services down, though it tries to avoid impacting players who are already engaged in a game, and won’t operate without some necessary features, like text content filtering. On Monday, engineers with responsibility for code relating to any weekend incidents meet to discuss what happened, and on Tuesday, the company begins capacity planning for the weekend ahead. It’s also when Roblox observes TACO Tuesday, an acronym for “test actual capacity on Tuesday,” meaning engineers run tests constraining the resources available to code to ensure it runs properly under high traffic. Starting this year, Roblox has also rolled out a “chaos-testing” system, which deliberately injects errors, capacity constraints, and process restarts into the system to make sure it functions under stress. Like Roblox game creators, engineers are also empowered to make updates to their code at any time, with hundreds of deployments possible during a weekday. And by Friday, the team is ready to roll out and test any needed extra cloud capacity based on demand projections for that weekend. Making weekly decisions about capacity is essential in a world where games can go viral in a short amount of time. “Every three or four weeks, there’s a new big hit, so we’ve changed our capacity planning to be weekly,” Singh says. “And honestly, we would love for it to go to almost daily, where if there’s a hit within a day, we should still be able to find capacity.”
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E-Commerce
A Republican-sponsored proposal before Congress to mandate the sale of federal public lands received a mixed reception Monday from the governors of Western states.A budget proposal from Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee would mandate the sale of more than 3,125 square miles (8,093 square kilometers) of federal lands to state or other entities. It was included recently in a draft provision of the GOP’s sweeping tax cut package.At a summit Monday of Western state governors, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said the approach is problematic in New Mexico because of the close relationship residents have with those public lands.“I’m open” to the idea, said Lujan Grisham, a second-term Democratic governor and former congresswoman. “Except here.”“Our public lands, we have a very strong relationship with the openness, and they belong to all of us,” said Lujan Grisham, who was announcing written recommendations Monday on affordable housing strategies from the Western Governors’ Association. “And selling that to the private sector without a process, without putting New Mexicans first, is, for at least for me as a governor, going to be problematic.”Interior Department Secretary Doug Burgum was among the leaders from several federal agencies who attended the meeting that runs through Tuesday. He has touted the many potential uses for public lands that include recreation, logging and oil and gas production, saying it could boost local economies.Several hundred protesters in downtown Santa Fe denounced efforts that might privatize federal public lands, chanting “not for sale” and carrying signs reading “This land belongs to you and me” and “keep our public land free for future generations.”Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon voiced qualified support for plans to tap federal land for development.“On a piece-by-piece basis where states have the opportunity to craft policies that make sense we can actually allow for some responsible growth in areas with communities that are landlocked at this point,” he said at a news conference outside the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. “There may be value there.”Lee has said federal land sales under his proposal would target “isolated parcels” that could be used for housing or infrastructure, and would not include national parks, national monuments or wilderness.Land in 11 Western states from Alaska to New Mexico would be eligible for sale. Montana was carved out of the proposal after its lawmakers objected.In some states, such as Utah and Nevada, the government controls the vast majority of lands, protecting them from potential exploitation but hindering growth. Morgan Lee, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
The startup Warp is best known for its modern, AI-empowered take on the terminalthe decades-old, text-based interface that’s invisible to most in a world of touchscreens and mice, but still beloved by programmers and system administrators. The terminal is probably most familiar to the public from movies and TV shows, where its stark black background and arcane command-line language have come to symbolize hacker prowess. Warp added features that make the terminal and its often-cryptic commands less intimidating and easier to use, such as AI-enhanced autocomplete and suggestions, along with a collaborative system called Warp Drive that lets coworkers share frequently used commands and best practices. Now, Warp is betting that a similar kind of interface will help developers command artificial intelligence, in a world where code is increasingly generated and deployed by typing prompts to AI rather than writing it directly. [Image: Courtesy of Warp] “We’re moving from a world where developers traditionally have done most of their work by hand to one where they’re doing their work by prompt with agents,” says Zach Lloyd, Warp’s founder and CEO. Traditionally, developers have worked in an integrated development environment (IDE), which combines tools for navigating files, specialized text editing tabs for writing code, and easy access to tools that compile human-readable code into something computers can run. They’ve also often used terminal software like Warpsor more basic versionsto deploy code to servers, start automated processes, and troubleshoot errors. Zack Lloyd [Photo: Courtesy of Warp] But today, coders increasingly perform these tasks by issuing prompts to AI agents, which can generate code, execute commands to deploy it, and even diagnose problems on their own. “Our thesis is that to support this new workflow, what is needed is a workbench that really is neither the IDE or the terminal,” Lloyd says. Thats why Warp is launching what it calls an agentic development environmenta new class of tool that emphasizes terminal-style panes or tabs for typing prompts to AI agents, along with controls to help supervise the AIs operations. These controls regulate when AI agents need human approval to make changes to code or restrict them from executing certain commandssuch as deleting fileswithout explicit permission. Power users can open multiple tabs to interact with various agents, powered by AI from labs like Anthropic and OpenAI, and can monitor and guide them as they worksimilar to how developers have always invoked command-line tools from the terminal. AI agents can also execute terminal commands themselves under user supervision, useful for everything from managing cloud computing servers to debugging error messages. An enhanced version of Warp Drive even allows users to share information with AI agents as well as with human coworkers. [Image: Courtesy of Warp] “We’ve made this investment even before LLMs of, how do you centralize the team’s knowledge,” says Lloyd. “And that’s super valuable for an agent to access as well.” Since AI is still far from infallible, users can easily edit AI-generated code changescalled diffs (short for differences, in developer jargon)before approving them, or re-prompt the AI to correct errors. Individual Warp users can choose whether to operate entirely via prompts, or to open more traditional panes to edit code line by line, review AI changes, or use the classic Warp terminal. [Image: Courtesy of Warp] Lloyd says that integrating all of these features into a single AI-centric environment gives Warp an edge over other AI development tools like Cursor and Windsurf, which focus primarily on writing code. And by building a complete development environmentincluding coding and terminal toolsWarp has an advantage over Anthropic’s Claude Code, which operates from within a terminal, he says. “We are one layer outside of that, so we can be the whole agentic development environment, which means that we can do things in terms of the user experience that they just simply can’t do,” Lloyd says. “We can have diffs editable, we can do system notifications, we can have a UX for managing agents across all your panes and tabs.” Warp, which already has more than 500,000 users, plans to keep pricing the same as it rolls out these new features, with plans starting at $15 and $40 per month, alongside a limited free version and custom pricing for enterprise editions. Lloyd says revenue is growin fastbetween 5% and 15% per week during 2025and hes optimistic that trend will continue as developers look for tools to efficiently steer and collaborate with AI coding agents. “It just is cool that that interface that we built for doing this with commands works extremely well for agents,” he says.
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