MDL 3166 tracker: where the Roblox litigation stands

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This page tracks In re: Roblox Corporation Child Sexual Exploitation and Assault Litigation, MDL No. 3166 (N.D. Cal., 3:25-md-03166), from the docket itself — we maintain a real-time docket alert on the master case and update this page on significant events. Everything here is sourced to court records; where a figure comes from anywhere else, we say so. All claims described are allegations: no court has found Roblox or any co-defendant liable, and the defendants dispute the allegations.

Current status

The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation consolidated 31 actions into MDL 3166 on December 12, 2025, before Chief Judge Richard Seeborg in the Northern District of California, with Magistrate Judge Ajay Krishnan handling discovery. As of the Judicial Panel’s August 3, 2026 report, 177 member cases are pending (182 total actions), and the litigation is in active discovery. The JPML’s transfer order names four defendants — Roblox, Discord, Snap, and Meta — and centers on a common pattern: allegations that platform design enabled adult predators to contact and groom children on Roblox and move them to other platforms where exploitation continued.

Two threshold questions remain undecided, and they are the events this tracker exists to catch. First, no court has ruled on the platforms’ Section 230 and First Amendment defenses — the motion-to-dismiss ruling will be the single most consequential docket event of the litigation’s first phase. Second, the arbitration fight opened in July 2026, when coordinated bellwether complaints were filed against Roblox and Discord (Dkts. 395–403) to tee up whether the platforms can push families’ claims out of court and into arbitration.

The orders that matter so far

A short list, most recent first, from the master docket: CSAM-evidence preservation protocols for both sides entered August 13, 2026 (Dkts. 415–416); a consolidated guardian-ad-litem framework order entered August 5, 2026 (Dkt. 414) — significant because nearly every plaintiff is a minor; an expert-discovery stipulation approved August 4, 2026; arbitration bellwether complaints filed July 28, 2026 (Dkts. 395–403); an amended common-benefit and timekeeping pretrial order July 31, 2026; and omnibus motion-to-compel briefing underway since July 2026. The docket passed roughly 476 entries in mid-August 2026.

Where the cases come from

Those 28 transfers, reconciled from the JPML’s transfer orders through May 2026, are the visible tip: most member cases are filed directly in the Northern District of California regardless of where the family lives, and no public record counts direct-filed cases by home state. The transferred-case table understates every state’s real participation — we publish it because it is the only by-state figure the court record supports, and we label its limit rather than guess past it.

What this MDL is not

MDL 3166 is regularly confused with MDL 3047, the social-media addictive design litigation (4:22-md-03047, also N.D. Cal., Judge Gonzalez Rogers). The JPML itself drew the line in its June 3, 2026 order denying transfer: MDL 3166 concerns predator contact and exploitation of children; MDL 3047 concerns addictive-design and mental-health claims. A family may have claims that sound in either — that is a question for case review, not for a tracker page.

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