For the majority of the last four days, Minecraft's Realms servers have faced significant downtime. According to Mojang's official service status updates, "intermittent failures or slowdowns" started on August 13th. Despite occasional reports of servers being online short-term, they remain largely inaccessible to most users today.

Realms is a subscription-based service providing access to a private multiplayer server for the multiplatform Bedrock Edition of Minecraft. Depending on the subscription tier, it allows between three and ten players to share the same Minecraft world, with the owner having the ability to install mods from Minecraft's paid marketplace.

On Tuesday, the Mojang Status account tweeted, "You may experience intermittent failures or slowdowns connecting to Realms. We are actively working to resolve this." By Wednesday, the service was reportedly "up and running," though with some lag issues. However, many players disagreed, with hundreds reporting ongoing access problems. The team continued to work on the issues, and Realms was finally declared to be "back up and running globally" yesterday. Despite this declaration, another tweet mentioned that connectivity problems and latency had increased again within hours. Around eleven hours ago, Mojang confirmed they were still working diligently to restore the service worldwide.

I attempted to log into my Realms account a couple of hours ago, but it remains inaccessible for me. The connectivity troubles seem to have started with the release of Minecraft update 1.21.20, which adjusted how Realms invite links function and aimed to fix several bugs related to both Realms and Minecraft in general, as detailed in the patch notes. A follow-up update, 1.21.21, was released the next day to enhance "reliability of connecting to Realms.” Unfortunately, it appears to have fallen short.

While Minecraft is truly an impressive game, the infrastructure supporting the Bedrock edition often feels precarious. Managing my Realms account is an unpleasant chore, yet it's a cost I reluctantly bear to play cross-platform Minecraft with my child. However, paying £6.69 a month for a Realms server that is frequently nonfunctional is a price I am increasingly unwilling to pay.