Possible reasons why Minecraft Realms is down (August 2024)

Minecraft has been having a bit of a rough time for the past few days, mostly because of their online multiplayer services. Players are not able to connect to their Realms world, and the issue is so widespread that it has spawned variations as well; some players can connect to Realms but then the game crashes after a few minutes while other players cannot even see the option to choose their Realms world.

Realms is currently down due to a possible server and host connection issue. For some reason, the game is not able to communicate and establish a connection with the servers.

While Mojang Studios is working to fix the issue, let’s look at everything we know about the Minecraft Realms outage and why this is such a big issue.

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Exploring the possible reasons behind Minecraft Realms' current situation

The whole Realms debacle started around August 13-14 when players started noticing connection failure or laggy and slow connection with the Realms world. But soon this issue spread with a complete shutdown of the service.

While Mojang Studios did mention that Realms are up and running, many players started reporting that the service is down again with many of the issues being related to connection and stability.

The reasons behind the issue could be anything from client-server connection error, server structure change, or a bug in the game that is preventing players from connecting to their world. As of now, Mojang Studios has not confirmed the reason behind the issue and the team is working on fixing it.

There are many reasons why this is a big issue. While many online match-making games have experienced similar server issues, Minecraft is different. Here are some points to note:

• Realms is a paid service that gives the player access to servers to host their game and play multiplayer.
• Many players have their world saved on the Realms server, which means any data corruption can lead to their world getting deleted.
• Since their world is saved on the Realms server, they cannot play the game entirely unless they download it and save it locally. But the inability to connect is not allowing them to even download their world file.

So the fact that players have paid for something they cannot access, and even risk losing their game progress in case some bugs wipe out their world is what makes this issue so grave. Mojang Studios did release a hotfix but it did not do much for the issue. As of now, there is no say as to when the issue will be fixed.