Today was InWorldz’s last day. Grid co-founder Beth Reischl estimated that Rackspace would shut off the InWorldz servers at the end of their business day, 5:00 p.m. CST, which works out to 3:00 p.m. InWorldz time. While the main servers have not yet been turned off as of this writing, the InWorldz login server was shut down around 5:00 p.m., leaving only a handful of avatars still online on a few sims. No users can log in. InWorldz is now gone.
Over the past few days, avatars gathered at spots like InWorldz Desert Island 1 (the site of the original welcome centre) to chat and commiserate with each other:
After InWorldz Desert Island 1 shut down (as many sims did throughout the course of the day today), people went over to InWorldz Desert Island 2, which was still up, to spend their last hours together:
Despite heroic efforts by Beth Reischl and her team to do as many OAR backups of as many sims as possible before shut-down, many people are still facing the loss of most of their inventory. Some are bitter and angry; others are resigned. Nobody is happy about this turn of events.
InWorldz was the victim of some poor business decisions and just plain bad luck. In a period of sixteen months, two of the largest and most popular OpenSim-based grids—Avination and InWorldz—have failed.
Does this mean the end for OpenSim? No. Many of the people affected by the Avination and InWorldz closures simply decided to move to other OpenSim grids, such as Kitely, DigiWorldz and the Discovery grid.
But InWorldz is officially dead, as of this evening. Now we wait to see whether a new grid will rise from its ashes.
UPDATE July 28th: After they completed doing the OAR archives of all the sims, InWorldz staff turned the login server back on. If you try to log into InWorldz this morning, you will be able to get into InWorldz Desert Island (IDI) 1, which is the only sim that is left running. Even though Rackspace has not been paid, the servers still seem to be running! Right now there are about 50 avatars chatting with each other. We have no idea how long the sim will stay up, so you might want to come and visit with some old friends before InWorldz really is gone for good!
Here’s a snapshot of us at IDI:
