A large-scale outage in Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) US-EAST-1 region early this morning disrupted several of the world’s biggest online platforms, including popular games like Fortnite, Roblox, and Wordle.
For those unfamiliar, AWS is Amazon’s cloud computing platform. It provides servers, storage, and infrastructure that power websites, apps, and online games around the world. Essentially, many online services rely on AWS to run smoothly, and that is why an outage in a single region can have so many consequences on the internet.
The issue began around 2:30 AM ET, when AWS reported an “operational issue” affecting its North Virginia region. Because this region hosts a massive portion of the internet’s infrastructure, the impact quickly spread worldwide, taking down major websites and online services.
Right now, Amazon said engineers were seeing “significant signs of recovery,” but many platforms are still experiencing slowdowns or intermittent failures.
Major Games and Services Hit Hard
The outage has a noticeable effect on games as well. It seems Epic and Amazon are impacted the most:
- Fortnite and the Epic Games Store suffered major login failures, leaving many players unable to connect to servers.
- Roblox users also reported connection errors, though Downdetector data later showed a steady recovery through the morning.
- Wordle runs on The New York Times’ infrastructure and was temporarily down, blocking players from logging in or tracking streaks.
- Amazon’s own games, including Throne and Liberty and Lost Ark, confirmed problems on their official X (Twitter) accounts.
- Even Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds had connection issues, however, console networks like PlayStation Network (PSN) remained largely unaffected.
Wider Internet Impact
The outage did not just stop at gaming. AWS’s disruption is causing ripple effects across the internet, impacting:
- Snapchat
- Alexa and Ring smart devices
- Airtable, Canva, and Perplexity
- Slack also has connection issues
- Even the McDonald’s app briefly went offline
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas confirmed on X that their downtime was directly linked to AWS’s infrastructure problems.
AWS Response and Recovery
Amazon engineers were “immediately engaged” to resolve the incident. According to AWS’s official status page, the first reports appeared at 3:11 AM ET, followed by a company acknowledgment at 3:51 AM ET.
By 5:27 AM ET, AWS said there were “significant signs of recovery,” and by 6:35 AM ET, most major systems were reportedly functioning again, but with some remaining delays.
“We are seeing strong recovery across the majority of AWS services,” Amazon noted, confirming ongoing work toward full restoration.
Current Status
As of early afternoon, most gaming platforms and online services are back online. Reports of new outages are going down as well, and recovery appears to be progressing smoothly.
The exact root cause of the incident has not been disclosed yet, but Amazon says they are continuing to monitor the situation to make sure all systems are fully back up and stable.
If you are experiencing issues with any games or platform, give it some time. Everything should go back up in the afternoon, if nothing else happens!
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