What to do if you get a notification that the world is shutting down

[Ilan Tochner]

The huge increase in AI bot activity on the web causes millions of servers to become overloaded with requests. On Kitely this can cause our monitoring service to lose its verified connection to affected servers, which prompts our system to automatically shut them down to avoid data loss. Our system sends viewers that are currently logged into worlds on such servers a notification 2 minutes before it shuts down the servers.

If you get a notification that the world that you're currently in is on a server that is shutting down then teleport to the Kitely Welcome Center, wait 3 minutes for the shut down process to complete, then teleport back to the world you were in. This will enable you to avoid being disconnected when the world is shut down.

[Crash McCloud]

LOL, great attention getter of a title! "The world is shutting down! What do I do??? " Ohhhh ... you mean land in a virtual world, not real life. Whew! The sky isn't really falling! Well, in some parts of the (real) world at least.

Thanks for the reassuring info, Ilan! BTW, doing the complicated arithmetic there, is one minute how long we actually have after leaving a world in Kitely (& changing our minds or remembering something we forgot to do first or "Crash"-ing due to a lost Internet signal--as if that's ever happened to me, which is why that isn't my middle name ) to come back before it shuts down?

[Ilan Tochner]

Hi Crash,

My recommendation is that you have the Home button set to the Kitely Welcome Center and press that button the moment you see the message. I'm not sure how quickly you'll get disconnected otherwise.

[Tess Juel]

LOL, great attention getter of a title! "The world is shutting down! What do I do??? " Ohhhh ... you mean land in a virtual world, not real life.

Since you mention it, Real Life could do with a reboot. It is a bit shaky at the moment.

[Fayre Scribe]

I don't get notification. I just continually keep getting kicked out. Doesn't matter if I'm inactive and just listening to music or busy building or filling boxes. I hear the "ding" and my screen freezes. And whether I log back in within 10 seconds or a minute or more, I end up waiting at a hub for my sim to come back up. And when your sim is a 4x4 and has a lot on it, that takes longer than usual. Why does the sim go down so quickly? Can't it stay up at least a minute so you have time to log back in when you never meant to log out?

[Ilan Tochner]

Hi Fayre,

The issue that is causing these server restarts is that AI bots are basically denial of servicing our control servers and thus causing them to lose connection with servers that are used to run worlds (most often this happens to just a single server at a time).

When a control server detects that it has lost connection with a server that is used to host worlds it sends the users who are currently inside one of those worlds a notification, waits two minutes and then shuts down the server in order to get a different one from AWS to replace it with.

When a server that hosts worlds detects that it has lost connection with its control server it starts shutting down the worlds that it is currently hosting in order to save all the changes they contained before it is shut down by its control server. Delaying shutting down the worlds in this scenario would mean that they might not finish saving their content before the server that is hosting them is shut down. Doing that, or continuing to run a world server without connection to a control server, could result in data loss, which is worse than getting disconnected. That's why once a world server detects that it has lost connection with a control server it immediately starts shutting down the worlds it is hosting.

[Ilan Tochner]

FYI, we wrote and deployed an automated forums deactivation monitor which should help make our forums less attractive to AI bots and hopefully reduce the severity of their scraping "attacks" so they won't take down our entire site. It should kick in within a minute of when an overwhelming number of AI bots "attack" our site and automatically reactive the forums within 10 minutes after the "attack" subsides.

This won't prevent AI bots from causing world restarts but it should help reduce the likelihood that they'll take down our entire system.