Amazon Web Services has broken down and that means half the internet suddenly doesn’t work, including many prominent video games and services.
We hope you had a good time play Arc Raiders and other online games over the weekend, because it might be a while before you can do it again. Monday morning has seen a massive internet outage across many different online services and apps, including video games, and it’s not clear when it’s going to be fixed.
The problem is that Amazon Web Services, which provides online access for many of the biggest companies, has gone down, so anything that uses them is either running poorly or not at all.
There are reports of Roblox, Fortnite, and Nintendo Switch Online all being down, as well as other games from the same publishers and many more besides.
Curiously, the official status websites for the various games and companies are generally not showing a problem, but if you check on third party sources, such as Downdetector, you can see a massive spike in reported problems on Monday morning.
People are reporting not being able to launch games or not being able to access online features, although in most cases you can still play the offline portions of the games.
We’ve just tried a bunch of games, including Fortnite, and for the online-only titles we couldn’t even log in properly, so it’s clearly a serious problem.
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It’s not clear whether this is the result of a hack or someone spilling tea on the servers, but whatever’s going on it has happened before, and was back up and running within a few hours.
However, not everything will necessarily come back at the same time. You can try and keep up to date with the official Amazon Web Services status website here, although it’s not particularly user friendly.
What games are down because of Amazon Web Services?
The following games have all been experiencing problems on Monday morning, although by the time you read this they may be back up and running:
- Fortnite
- Roblox
- Nintendo Switch Online
- Palworld
- Rematch
There’s no doubt much more than that, but the only real recourse is to sit back and wait for it to be fixed – and to feel glad this didn’t happen at a more inconvenient time.
The problem started in the US and Amazon’s European’s servers are not affected, so things like Amazon Prime Video, that are definitely down in North America, should still be working here.
Others, such as Snapchat and Crunchyroll and most video games, are being affected no matter where you are in the world though, so if you’re having problems you’ll just have to wait and see when they come back online.
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