Was just wondering if there was something going on or what. I had it confirmed by several other people that the game crashed for them too.
Teddi was doing some work on the web server past 20 mins or so, but shouldn't be related. Make sure they/you have latest gmod update installed, I had to download one today. Otherwise I just joined fine without issue. EDIT: nvm just crashed after 10 seconds.
Unless there's been another update, I'm not sure what could be causing this. Are we talking Garrysmod actually crashes or does it just kick you back to main menu?
Post-Mortem: Okay, this will get somewhat technical for the average user; but I'll try to keep it as straightforwards as possible. Recently it was brought to my attention that a nginx exploit (pronounced engine-x) was making the rounds; which essentially allows the webserver to be utilized as part of a larger botnet. What this means is you could send a specially crafted request to the webserver going "hey, I'm asking for you to poke me, but send it to this place instead" and the web-server would then honour this request. Alone it doesn't make for much of an exploit; but combine it with a few thousand webservers and suddenly you have a rather strong force at your fingertips. To avoid being part of this botnet, patching this was key. I decided while I was at it to further look at some http/2 work and getting the web-server compliant with it. To explain, HTTP1.1 is what we call a 'half-duplex' connection. This means you can both send and receive - but not at the same time. This is why for example having multiple images on a page can take a while to load, and it's always one by one. HTTP2 makes this connection a full-duplex; ie we send and receive at the same time. For you, this means faster loading and better responses from the server. If you want to see a demo of this, visit here - https://http2.akamai.com/demo. (Note: Http2 is now enabled, but only Firefox / Edge users will see any improvements, I need to do some further work to make it Chrome-compatible). At some point during the building of the new version of Nginx, something went wrong which caused two notable issues. One - the Wiki seemed to stop being responsive with nginx in any way, shape or form. The other is that for some reason the response the web-server was sending to a player on the loading screen would cause the game to crash. I've reported this to Facepunch, they can't fix it so hey ho, can confirm a crash to desktop issue courtesy of Awesomium. I've since corrected the issue and all seems well again. I do apologise for that and this shouldn't happen again.
Woo learning experience at least. If anyone notices something seriously wrong on the servers just reach out to us on Steam too, always best to make sure we're aware of it asap. In this case I noticed Never's post immediately so all good.