Someone definitely unplugged something they shouldn’t have. This morning the worldwide internet is seeing some major outages after Amazon’s AWS server farms suffered a whoopsie, and it took down big-name games like Fortnite and Roblox, and as Eurogamer spotted, Palworld, Clash Royale and various Nintendo online services. Many of which are yet to recover.
Right now, you still can’t even launch Fortnite through then Epic Games Store, let alone join a service, with the option just grayed out. Nintendo is also still struggling, with both Switch and Switch 2 network services offline at the time of writing, as well as their mobile offerings.
For fans of brainrot, however, it seems Roblox is now back online, albeit chugging a little. Er, yay? Palworld is also reporting that it’s back online and multiplayer is working as normal.
However, the most serious outage is still affecting me: I cannot get Connections to run on my New York Times puzzle app, and frankly I’m struggling to cope.
It seems the issue has taken place in Northern Virginia, where Amazon reports “multiple services” are down following “increased error rates and latencies.” This all started about four hours ago in Amazon’s US-EAST-1 region, specifically the “DyanamoDB endpoint,” which sounds painful. The 4.26 a.m. ET update explained “Engineers were immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue, and fully understanding the root cause,” later noting that the cause was related to “DNS resolution” of said endpoint. Throughout the early hours of the morning, Amazon has continued to update, explaining that issues are being resolved and everything is slowly getting back online, but it’s a slow process.
Given the speed with which things are being recovered, this doesn’t look like a significant attack or long-term problem, but rather yet another useful example of how just a couple of corporations now control access to the vast majority of the internet we usually take for granted.
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