Geoff Chiang

Can also confirm that whitelisting vortex.data.microsoft.com in PiHole avoids the issue.  This is still a bug - the application should not be crashing.

Related: achievements also do not work with this domain blocked.  I noticed a while ago that I was not getting achievements awarded (I suspect even before the Nether update).  Once this domain was whitelisted, they started working again.  Since the achievements are part of Microsoft’s ecosystem, it is quite reasonable that they would not work if communication to Microsoft fails.  However, this should probably be communicated in-game as a warning rather than as a silent failure.

Some additional information that may be of use.  I upgraded to 1.16.20 iOS and was experiencing crashes every 5-10 minutes.  Never had a crash before upgrading.  However, we have two other iPads in the household that were not crashing after upgrading.  One of the differences was that my iPad was pointing to a different DNS server - a machine in my home network.  I removed the custom DNS settings and tried again.  No crashes since.  The DNS server is part of PiHole, so it’s possible that it is interfering with some communications, resulting in the crash.