Due to the growing migration during the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been an increase in demand for Second Life’s land regions. Unfortunately due to this growth, it has been reported that demand for land is now limited. In their community blog post, Linden Labs comments:
We are committed to maintaining (and improving) the stability and performance of Second Life. So while we are very gratified that we can be of help to people in these trying times, unfortunately, our current server systems cannot accommodate unlimited growth without adversely impacting that stability and performance. This means that region inventory in Second Life will be extremely limited and may not be readily available until early fall.
The post goes on to explain the current situation is a by-product of migration from their existing ‘dedicated servers’ to a cloud hosting service and that it was an ongoing project, unfortunately, they did not expect (as no one did) a pandemic, which caused a surge of returning and new users, many of whom are looking for land. As a result, they are in a position where they are reaching max capacity on the ‘old server’ and this is expected to last until the cloud server is fully operational.
So, what can residents new and old expect with these land issues? Will it affect Mainland, Parcels, and land rentals? On this LL comments:
Regions may be intermittently available as existing regions are returned to us by their current owners. Due to the economic impact of the public health crisis, we do expect that some limited number of landholdings will be returned to the general inventory in the coming weeks. This means that there may be some regions available on-and-off, but it is more likely that normal region sales will not resume until our migration to the cloud is complete. While we do not have an exact date at this time, we anticipate it will be early fall.
Source: Second Life Community Page.
Until then land rentals should be available through third party renters as well as any mainland rentals. You can find out about Second Life land by visiting The Land Estate & Rentals destinations on the Second Life Website.
If you are interested in parcels, you can also visit this site for more details.