OSgrid is shutting down after 19 years

OSgrid, the oldest grid in the OpenSim metaverse, will shut down at midnight on December 31 after 19 years of operation, the grid’s board announced today.

The board blamed a malicious actor who used the grid’s own open code to flood it with massive amounts of randomized data that can’t be deduplicated, according to the announcement.

“This grid wasn’t defeated by time, nor by a lack of dedication from the team,” the board said. “It was systematically broken by a malicious actor who weaponized our core philosophy against us.”

I’ve asked the grid admins about who this attacker is, and what residents and other members of the OSgrid ecosystem should be doing between now and the end of the year to prepare for the closing, and what will happen to the money raised in this year’s silent auction. I will post a follow-up article when I hear back.

What went wrong

According to OSgrid’s announcement, in less than a year, the grid’s asset server grew from 5 terabytes to 17 terabytes, and 80 percent of that is now junk. The database table that tracks residents’ inventory items went from 3 gigabytes to 139 gigabytes, turning 10-minute backups into 12-hour ones.

“Our assets are effectively poisoned,” the board said.

The only way to stop the attacks would have been to lock down the grid and turn it into a closed, commercial operation, according to the announcement — and none of the technical staff were willing to run that kind of walled garden.

Late last month, the day after its annual community meeting, OSgrid announced it would start charging $1 a month for every region beyond a resident’s first region, which stays free. At the time, the grid said its hosting bills had grown larger than its annual donation income.

Those fees would have helped fight the attacks more efficiently, the board said in today’s announcement, but only a permanent lockdown would have ended them.

Meanwhile, volunteers were spending 11 hours a day, in shifts, blocking attacks and cleaning up data, the board said.

“We have survived and combatted many forms of attacks over the decades, but Entropy has finally won,” the board said.

The board made the final vote yesterday, and new registrations are now closed, according to the announcement. The grid will hold a last membership meeting on Sunday, October 18, at 11 a.m. Pacific time at Hurliman Plaza.

Hypergrid address: hg.osgrid.org:80:Hurliman Plaza

All earlier plans have been canceled, the board said, including the grid’s annual fundraiser, which was scheduled to run October 12 through 18. But the silent auction of donated builds has moved online, to the fundraising platform Zeffy, where winning bidders get a download link to an IAR — inventory archive — file of their item.

Nineteen years of free land

OSgrid launched in 2007 and is a nonprofit run entirely by unpaid volunteers, and it lets anyone connect their own regions to the grid for free, as we’ve previously reported. It has also served as a testing ground for OpenSim development, and its LBSA Plaza has long been the crossroads of the hypergrid.

The grid has 153,000 registered users, according to the announcement.

The past two years have been rough. In 2025, OSgrid wiped its inventory database to clear out nearly two decades of aging and corrupted data, and was down for more than a month. This spring, it went down again for about a month, blaming metadata size limits on the filesystem for its assets.

It also survived an outage of several months in 2014 and 2015, during which a significant number of assets were lost, according to our earlier coverage.