Amazon Outage Disrupts Online Gaming Services

Amazon.com's cloud-computing division experienced a widespread outage Monday that disrupted service for major online games and messaging platforms, affecting millions of users across North America and Europe.

The outage at Amazon Web Services originated in the company's Northern Virginia data center, where problems with domain name system resolution disrupted requests to DynamoDB, a database service, in the US-EAST-1 region. The technical failure cascaded across gaming, streaming and workplace communication platforms that rely on AWS infrastructure.

Popular games including Fortnite, Roblox, Pokémon Go and Clash Royale reported service interruptions. Users also experienced problems accessing messaging services WhatsApp and Slack, video-conferencing platform Zoom, and gaming networks including PlayStation Network and Xbox, according to outage-tracking website Down Detector.

AWS Outage Affects Multiple Gaming and Communication Platforms

Players reported login failures, matchmaking delays and interrupted gameplay. The official Fortnite Status account said "an outage affecting several services on the internet" was disrupting player logins. Developers of Clash Royale and Pokémon Go issued similar notifications about temporary service interruptions.

By Monday afternoon, AWS said it was observing "significant signs of recovery," with most requests succeeding. The company said engineers were processing a backlog of requests. AWS initially classified the problem as "Disrupted" before updating the status to "Degraded" as services stabilized.

The outage underscores the concentration risk facing internet services that depend on a handful of cloud-computing providers. AWS, the market leader in cloud infrastructure, supports thousands of applications and gaming services world-wide. Disruptions in its US-EAST-1 region (one of AWS's oldest and largest) triggered widespread internet problems since it is a key part of most companies.