CEO & CTOIf your league has been one of those affected by recurring stuttering races over the past few weeks, or worse, I want to start with a sincere apology. I’ve seen the same league names and race times coming up repeatedly in reports, and I’m very grateful to everyone affected for their patience.
I would not normally go into this much technical detail in a public announcement, but at this point I think you deserve a proper explanation. I also hope it offers some reassurance, because when this doesn't occur, we have already seen the platform run with complete stability, including a recent day with zero server issues in over 24h.
In technical terms, the problem over the last 2-3 weeks has usually come down to a single race hitting a rare simulator bug. When that happens, the simulator process crashes, consumes server memory, and can drag other services down with it. That makes it look like a wider server problem, when in reality it is more like one isolated race out of thousands causing a chain reaction.
This took a long time to trace because it leaves behind almost no useful evidence, no clear logs, no obvious error output, and very few clues beyond the fact that things break. I’m now very close to the root cause. It appears to be related specifically to races where refuelling rules are changed shortly before the start, leaving some managers preparing strategies with refuelling enabled and others with no-refuelling rules. That mismatch appears to be the source of the corruption. There are a few ways to solve this, and I’m working on those fixes now.
Alongside that work I'll also be moving into other simulator improvements like improving race starts, because those have not been smooth in recent weeks too. Thank you again for your patience while this is resolved.
