Minecraft Realms Down After Latest Patch: What’s Happening?

Minecraft’s Realms servers have been down for most of the last four days, leaving many players frustrated and unable to access their private multiplayer worlds. The issue started on August 13th, with Mojang’s official service status account reporting “intermittent failures or slowdowns.” Despite a few brief moments of uptime, the servers remain largely inaccessible today.

For those unfamiliar, Realms is a paid subscription service that lets players host private multiplayer servers on Minecraft’s Bedrock Edition. Depending on the subscription tier, it allows between three and ten players to join the same world. It’s a convenient way to play with friends across different platforms, with the added benefit of being able to install mods from Minecraft’s paid marketplace.

Mojang’s Status account has been providing updates, tweeting on Tuesday that players “may experience intermittent failures or slowdowns connecting to Realms.” By Wednesday, they announced the service was “up and running” but with some latency issues. However, the community begged to differ, with hundreds of players replying that they were still unable to connect.

Mojang continued to work on the problem, and by yesterday, Realms was declared “back up and running globally.” The team noted that the service had been running smoothly for more than an hour and thanked players for their patience. But the relief was short-lived, as within hours, another tweet acknowledged a resurgence of connectivity issues and latency problems. As of this morning, Mojang confirmed they are “still hard at work to restore the service globally.”

I personally tried to connect to my Realms account a couple of hours ago, and it’s still down. It seems the problems began with the release of Minecraft update 1.21.20, which aimed to fix several bugs and tweak how Realms invite links work. A follow-up patch, 1.21.21, was released the next day to improve “reliability of connecting to Realms,” but it doesn’t seem to have done the trick.

Minecraft remains an incredible game, but the infrastructure supporting the Bedrock edition sometimes feels like it’s held together with sticky tape. Managing a Realms account is a necessary hassle for those of us who want to play cross-platform, but it’s frustrating to pay £6.69 a month for a service that’s been down for days. Hopefully, Mojang can get things back on track soon.