AWS Outage Hits Epic Games, PlayStation Network, and More: What We Know

A reported Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage is causing disruptions to several popular online gaming services, including Fortnite, Rocket League, and ARC Raiders. According to outage monitoring platform Downdetector, over 40,000 users worldwide are experiencing issues with ARC Raiders, while nearly 4,000 users in the US are facing problems with AWS. AWS has denied the outage, attributing the issues to an unrelated event on the internet. However, users continue to report login failures, matchmaking errors, and server connection issues on various platforms. The affected services include: - Epic Games ecosystem: Fortnite players are experiencing login failures, matchmaking errors, and 'Servers Not Responding' messages. The Epic Games Store is also facing issues with purchases and redemptions. - Rocket League: Players are unable to log in or join matches due to Epic Online Services (EOS) timeouts. - ARC Raiders: The ART00004 Network Timeout error is preventing server connections. - Fall Guys: Matchmaking and login issues are reported across platforms. - PlayStation Network (PSN): Partial outages are affecting cross-platform games. - Steam: The platform has experienced outages for several hours. For users experiencing issues, the best course of action is to: - Monitor status.epicgames.com, Downdetector, or social media accounts like @FortniteStatus and @ARCRaidersGame for updates. - Avoid repeated logins to prevent account flags. - Wait for developers to resolve server-side issues like the ART00004 error. This is not the first time AWS has faced a major outage. In October, a massive AWS outage affected several high-profile websites and platforms, including Snapchat and Reddit. The issues originated with the Domain Name System (DNS), which disrupted the ability of apps to locate the proper address for the DynamoDB API on AWS. The cloud database service became unreachable for those applications, causing widespread disruptions. The root cause of the October outage was an underlying subsystem that monitors the health of its network load balancers used to distribute traffic across several servers. Amazon has since confirmed that all AWS services have returned to normal operations, although some services are still processing backlog messages.