An enormous Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage is having a huge impact across the internet, and gaming has not escaped the damage.
Games of all types, from Fortnite to Wordle to Roblox have been affected by the AWS outage and appear down for huge amounts of people today. Problems started at about 7.30am BST (that’s 2.30am ET) when gamign services started having huge spikes on the outage-detecting website Downdetector.
The root of the problems lie Amazon Web Services, but no specific cause is known yet: the Amazon Web Services dashboard just shows an “operational issue” in North Virginia. The AWS dashboard says “engineers were immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue”.
Anyway, the effect of the outage has been massive and is ongoiung in the gaming world with storefronts, online games, and more being interrupted. Im here to bring you the latest as we try and understand what happenbed and hope that services come back online soon.
Latest news
- A massive AWS outage has afffected swathes of the internet, including games and gaming services
- Fortnite, Wordle, Roblox, and storefronts like the Epic Games Store are down
- Problems began at around 2.30am ET / 7.30am BST
- AWS has said it’s now seeing “significant signs of recovery”
Gaming services hit by massive AWS outage
A huge Amazon Web Services (AWS) problem started earlier this morning at about 7.30am BST (2.30am ET) and has seen a whole host of gaming services and games hit by interruptions and straight-up failures.
This will be huge today with millions of gamers trying to play online or affect storefronts on the daily. Right now, we can see that the likes of Fortnite, Roblox, Wordle, and the Epic Game Store – and many, many more – have been affected.
Let’s do the rounds and see what the state of play is and if there’s any fix on the horizon.
Fortnite massively affected
One of the very biggest games in the world has been affected by the AWS outage: Fortnite is currently down for many.
My colleague Rhys just sent me the above screenshot showing that he just flat-out cannot sign in to the game.
The error reads: “Unable to sign in to your account for online services. Please try again later.”
Fortnite being down is partnered by Epic’s own storefront failing to load or let me log in online.
The above error screen is what I get and have had all morning…
PS Network seems fine…
In slightly better news, the PlayStation Network seems to be fine – at least for me and many others, despite there being some reports of outages.
From my testing however, the store, games, and PS direct, and all my account gumpf is fine – thankfully.
An update from AWS
We have an update from AWS!
Reporting at 2.27aam PT (that’s 10.27am BST), AWS said:
“We are seeing significant signs of recovery. Most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests. We will continue to provide additional information.”
Fingers crossed that means we’re now coming oput the end of this…
Cannot go fast right now in Sonic…
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds has been affected by the AWS outage too with my colleague Rhys sharing this screenshot showing that the connection to the server is just failing.
Phew! Wordle is back…
Wordle was badly hit by the AWS outage earlier, but appears to be back online now.
Though the page itself – hosted on the New York Times’ gaming site – loaded, it wouldn’t let users log in, meaning they wouldn’t be able to extend their all-important streaks.
The site now seems to be working normally, so you can go ahead and get your daily fix. (And if you need help, make sure you check out our Wordle today page for hints and discussion of the game.)
Thanks for the above update to our Global Editor-in-Chief, and Wordle warlock, Marc McLaren!
If you play Amazon games, you may be hit hard…
Perhaps somewhat predictably, if you’re someone who plays Amazon games it looks like you’re being hit hard right now.
The above image is from the Throne and Liberty X / Twitter account, and remains the latest update on the game which appears to acknowledge widespread problems for players trying to login and play…
Same goes for Lost Ark…
Unsurprisingly, the same goes for Amazon’s other big game, Lost Ark, with the official X / Twitter account offering an almost identical statement acknowledging the problems.
Roblox looks to have recovered
While the official Roblox X / Twitter account didn’t post any updates about the state of Roblox today, it looks like users have reported it recovering.
It’s also got a huge downward trend on Downdetector which means things are looking good for the immensely popular game platform.
We might be past the worst of it, folks
I think we may well be coming out the otherside of this massive AWS outage that’s affected loads of gaming services, everyone.
Downdetector graphs across nearly all major gaming storefronts, platforms, and games are showing downward trends and we here at TechRadar are accessing a number of them fine ourselves now.
Fingers crossed that the worst of it is over…
