You've clipped in, loaded Zwift, and gone looking for a RoboPacer. They've all gone. No Sofia grinding out base miles, no Constance group to chase down, just empty roads. You're not imagining it, and you haven't done anything wrong. Zwift's RoboPacers go offline regularly, more often than most riders realise.
Here's what's actually happening, how bad the problem is, and what to do with your session while you wait.
It's not your setup. It's Zwift's servers.
RoboPacers aren't bots running on your device. They're server-side entities managed entirely by Zwift's infrastructure. When they go down, nothing you do on your end will fix it. Reinstalling, restarting, checking for updates — none of it will bring them back. You're waiting for Zwift.
The fastest way to confirm what's happening is Zwift's status page at status.zwift.com. When RoboPacers are having issues, you'll see an active incident listed there, usually titled something like "RoboPacers restarting and disappearing." If you see that, the pacers are down platform-wide.
How often do RoboPacers actually go down?
More often than you'd expect from a paid platform. Zwift's own status page tracks historical uptime, and the RoboPacer numbers are notably worse than for the rest of the game.
The rest of Zwift — rides, workouts, events — sits at around 99.8% over the same period. The RoboPacers run on infrastructure that clearly behaves differently, and it's been struggling for months.
Looking back through the incident log: May 2023, August 2024, January 2025, July 2025, and now twice in May 2026. Not a one-off. A pattern.
Why does this keep happening?
Zwift hasn't published a technical explanation, so what follows is informed speculation. RoboPacers replaced the older Pace Partners in late 2022. Unlike workouts or events, they run as persistent, always-on entities that need to be live in every world, around the clock, for every rider on the platform. That's a fundamentally different infrastructure problem from running a one-hour event or uploading a completed activity.
The incidents tend to involve the pacers "restarting and disappearing" — Zwift's own wording on the status page. That sounds like something crashing and relooping rather than planned downtime. When Zwift pulls them offline deliberately (as happened this weekend), it's usually because leaving them in that broken state causes more confusion than simply taking them out.
What to do when RoboPacers are down
You've checked the status page. The pacers are gone for a while. Here are the actual options.
Ride a Zwift workout
If you were heading to a RoboPacer for structured work — tempo, zone 2 base miles — a workout at the same watt target does the job with more precision. Check the calculator for your watt number first, then find a workout in that range. The training effect is the same.
Join a group ride or race
Zwift Events runs regardless of RoboPacer status. A paced group ride at your target W/kg is a direct swap, and you'll have more riders to draft off. Filter by W/kg in the Events tab or on ZwiftPower.
Just ride free
Pick a route and go at whatever feels right. Without a pacer to chase, you often settle into a more honest effort than you'd manage otherwise.
Wait
Past outages have typically cleared within a few hours, though this weekend's incident looks like it may run longer. Subscribe to updates on the status page and come back when the email lands.
Will Zwift fix the reliability problem?
Hard to say. No infrastructure changes targeting RoboPacer stability have been announced, and the recurring outages suggest whatever is causing this hasn't been fully resolved between incidents. What has improved is communication — the status page updates come faster than they used to, and the call to disable the pacers proactively rather than leave them thrashing is at least cleaner.
Practically: treat RoboPacer sessions as likely but not guaranteed. Keep a backup plan for sessions that matter, and bookmark the status page.