I figure that if we did live in a computer simulation it's been 13.8 billion years since the last downtime. I'm skeptical software could run for so long without any catastrophic bugs.
Plus the whole mess seems pretty glitchy to me. I'm guessing undergraduate work at best.
That's an excellent point, we wouldn't know or be aware of that. For all we know the system is offline everyday as our reality stops for a thousand year for maintenance.
2. While testing out a RTC program on 8085 processors in college we used to run the clock faster just to check if Clock counted to all conditions correctly. There is a always a fast forward option to jump the states you are interested in.
3. For the people running the simulation the time between big bang and heat death could be something like 5 mins what we perceive as billions of years.
And any downtime is likely to be invisible to anyone inside the simulation. Even a catastrophe could have the simulators restoring from tape and putting things back the way they were while we files are none the wiser.
Is it fate or freewill? It's a debate as old as philosophy.