Luobu was the mainland Chinese counterpart of Roblox that was released in December 2020. Luobu enjoyed a sustainable player base before it shut down just a year later in December 2021. Regarding the shutdown, on the official Chinese Roblox website, it was stated that the current iteration of Luobu was merely a test run to see how the platform would perform in China. They further elaborated on optimizing Luobu later on for the future and relaunching it to its fullest capability.
This is what the website stated — it seemed like everything was fine behind the scenes. Now, what people do not know is that everything that was written on that webpage was a lie. The truth had been covered up by Chinese authorities and Roblox themselves to the public, and just recently numerous anonymous Luobu employees and regular users have come out to tell their accounts of how Luobu truly shut down. Below is the timeline of what went down, gathered and compiled from sources that witnessed the event(s) first-hand.
In mid-November 2021, just a month before the shutdown of Luobu, there was sporadic suspicious activity happening within its servers, and their employees could not pinpoint the source of it. A few examples of these activities occurring are employees being redirected to odd error pages with random walls of Chinese text after configuring site settings, and employees being locked out of their accounts. A few weeks later, right before the end of November, an employee reported that their entire computer was somehow wiped, and the only thing that was left on it was a .txt file called “忘记了.txt”, which translated into the word “forget”. The contents of the .txt file at this time are unknown. This small series of events would lead into what could have been the actual cause of the Luobu shutdown just a few weeks later.
A few weeks now pass by, and now described are the events that lead to the most likely conclusion of the Luobu shutdown: On December 7, 2021, just a day before the shutdown, catastrophic server damage had been detected on Luobu servers in the afternoon, as many backups and data points of the Luobu servers were irreversibly deleted and could not be recovered. To make matters worse, every single file related to the Luobu servers was somehow deleted on most, if not all Luobu computers. If there was still such a server file found on one of the computers, it was already also somehow corrupted. Here is where the odd part comes in, as employees were panicking to salvage as much as they could, one employee reported going on a Luobu FTP site to scavenge for more reusable data to rebuild the servers, only to be met with hundreds of .txt files with the name “再见.txt” which translated into “goodbye” in Chinese. Again, the contents of these .txt files remain unknown. Just a few minutes later, a sudden mass renaming of Luobu user accounts had begun to occur (approximately a few hundred), and the accounts would be renamed into “Account Forgotten (insert user id here)”. Before things could get even worse, employees had instantly shut down the site servers to prevent more damage from occurring. Game servers would stay up and running until they were eventually shut down due to the extensive server damage around midnight on December 8. A maintenance page was put up just after this happened. Just a day later, Chinese government officials were called into the Luobu headquarters to investigate the cause. After the investigation, the headquarters were closed for an indefinite amount of time.
A few days after the incident, Two employees reported receiving calls from multiple Chinese numbers in a robotic male voice that stated the following two words in Chinese: “Luobu. Goodbye.”
The rest of the anonymous employee accounts of the incident all related to the December 7 incident. After all of this had unfolded, in the United States, Roblox had caught eye of the situation and had done some damage control, deleting the accounts as soon as possible with these “Account Forgotten” usernames in the process as Luobu employees could not turn on their servers in case another attack like this happened. On December 8, Luobu’s shutdown was announced, and this is where they claim it was shut down due to “testing purposes”. In reality, this was not the case – they hastily put this message up on their news site, lying in the process due to the recent events that had just occurred.
To add on to this, there were numerous users on Luobu who were experiencing odd phenomenons in the days leading to the shutdown. One user had stated that whenever they would occasionally join a game by themselves, an account with an “Account Forgotten (user id)” username would erratically move around said user’s character and spam “goodbye” in Chinese, before leaving within ten to fifteen seconds. Numerous users had also reported being in single player games and seeing skyboxes suddenly changed into all white, and seeing the word “goodbye” written in big red font in Chinese letters before their game crashed within five seconds. One of the last significant phenomenons described were error message ones — a few Luobu players reported their games crashing suddenly with an error message saying “forget” in Chinese.
All in all, nothing was ever said of these events within the Luobu headquarters that unfolded on December 7, as Roblox and the Chinese government had covered everything up so as to not get widespread media attention.
Things seemed to have calmed down for a few months until July 2022, where five million leftover Luobu accounts were suddenly renamed to the “Account Forgotten (user id)” naming scheme. These accounts were then all deleted within thirty minutes by Roblox employees – no one from the public eye caught note of this. It is rumored that this mass renaming was related to the breach that had occurred a few months later. These accounts were one of the last of what remained of Luobu. In the summer of 2023, some of these accounts were unterminated by Roblox supposedly for investigation purposes.
After all of this, Roblox still plans to reboot Luobu sometime in the future under a different name, with the past incident obviously being put behind in the past – they are relooking to rebuild everything from the ground up.
Finally, whoever was behind all of this remains unknown. Of course there has been speculation of disgruntled employees being the ones behind these incidents after leaving Luobu, but it really could have been anyone. The motive seems to have been this though – the one (or multiple people) who was/were behind this wanted to take Luobu down and let it be forgotten to history; they succeeded. This series of incidents/phenomenons are certainly one of the strangest Roblox mysteries to have ever seen the light of day.