It seems brands are starting to get used to platform outages disrupting their ad campaigns. 

The latest in a string of technical snafus comes from gaming platform Roblox, which crashed on Thursday and didn't get back up and running until Sunday night. 

The crash upended Chipotle's in-game promotion, where it gave away $1 million worth of free burritos on Roblox as part of a Halloween event in the game. And originally Roblox players speculated the outage was related to the giveaway; the Chipotle experience went live at 6:30 p.m. ET on Oct. 28, just before the Roblox outage began.

Despite the hiccup, which resulted in Chipotle giving out the remainder of the free burrito codes, the restaurant chain isn't detered by the situation. 

"We've been thrilled with the launch response as we've had millions of game plays on Roblox, and we look forward to more engagement with the Chipotle Boorito Maze remaining live on Roblox," Tressie Lieberman, VP, digital and off-premise at Chipotle, said in an email. Chipotle ended up distributing more than 120,000 free entree codes in the experience and is extending access to its virtual items due to the demand, Lieberman added. 

Roblox, for its part, was quick to say that any issues were not related to the Chipotle promotion. On Twitter, Roblox wrote, “We know that this outage was not related to any specific experiences or partnerships on the platform.”

Once Roblox was back online, Chipotle alerted fans with an image on Twitter that said, “Welcome to Chipotle! Pls don’t yell at me. The burrito is innocent.” It also decided to give out the rest of the free burrito codes. 

The outage is reminiscent of other technical issues on high-profile platforms in the last few months. In October, Facebook and its sites were down globally for a day, causing headaches for brands reliant on its ads business. Then shortly after, Twitch was the target of a hack that released the platform's source code and revealed payouts to creators. As brands become more interested and invested in the metaverse and gaming, the outages are a reminder that this new marketing world is not without its growing pains.

But outages might just be part of the risk of this new marketing channel. 

“Outages happen with every big media platform,” Mike Proulx, VP and research director at Forrester, wrote in a note. “While the duration of Roblox’s outage is unfortunate, advertisers are savvy enough to understand that this is part of the risk and reward when it comes to emerging media.”

The outage, according to Proulx, will likely only be a hiccup for the company as long as Roblox makes good with the brands that were impacted, and he doesn't expect it to deter other brands from partnering with them. 

Still, three days is a long outage and may give brands pause or cause them to temporarily change their Roblox campaigns. “Brands could very well hesitate to do more proactive activations with Roblox like giving away free products,” Michael Ro, principal researcher at Gartner, said via email. “Instead, they might stick to safer promotions like in-game product placements until they are reassured by the next steps outlined in the upcoming post-mortem.”

Several brands have done their own Roblox activations, including Hyundai and Warner Bros. The platform has gained popularity among brands as a way to connect with younger audiences. Roblox reported 43.2 million daily active users on its platform in the second quarter. Although company executives have said “over 50% of the people on our platform are over 13 [years old],” a large group of its players are children aged 9 to 12 years old.