Fortnite, Roblox, Clash Royale and various other games and gaming services have been struck down by an “operational issue” with Amazon’s web services today, though Amazon themselves promise that they’re already seeing “significant signs of recovery”.
According to the provider’s bug report dashboard, 62 Amazon services have been “impacted”, with some experiencing “increased error rates and latencies”. Amazon’s down detector says they first started noticing issues in “the US-EAST-1 Region”, earlier this morning UK time, but the problem has spread – Amazon provide cloud computing support to a vast number of clients worldwide.
Fortnite players report that they’re unable to sign in, with the Epic Games Store refusing to load. Our guides writer Callum has been having trouble getting Roblox to run. The busted cloud functionality has even taken out the legs from under Rematch, forcing players to go out and play football using actual feet atrophied by years of computer thralldom.
Amazon’s outage has trashed a wider range of non-gaming thingywatsits, including AI tool Perplexity, Snapchat, Airtable, Canva, and even various mechanisms for the ordering of unhealthy takeaway food. *Extremely Emperor Palpatine voice* I’m afraid the McDonalds app will be quite non-operational when your friends arrive. I’ve also noticed that Slack is running rather stiffly this morning. More’s the pity, I will be unable to burden other RPS writers with my requests for edits.
On Reddit, people are reporting difficulties with the company’s Alexa chatbot. Apparently, Amazon-powered doorbells have stopped working in some places. Somebody go rewatch Terminator and remind me whether this is how Skynet got started.
I’ll update you as and when the mists clear. In the meantime, maybe stick to playing games offline.
