It’s not your Wi-Fi: Palworld, Roblox, Forntite and half the internet decided to take a break.
Roblox, Fortnite, and Palworld, along with several other online games and apps, have gone offline on Monday afternoon (20 October) as a major outage affects multiple parts of the internet.
The issue appears to stem from problems with Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the world’s biggest hosting platforms that powers countless online games and apps. The Fortnite team were among the first to confirmed the outage on X, writing.
In their post, they said that “An outage affecting several services on the internet is also impacting Fortnite log-ins,” and that they were “investigating” on the matter.
Palworld confirmed the issue on X as well, saying that the outage is “affecting Palworld multiplayer connectivity”:
Roblox’s status website also lists an active incident that’s knocking the game offline. Football title Rematch has also reported being affected and pointed towards AWS as the cause. On top of that, according to Downdetector.com, other games that seem to be affected by the outage include Clash Royale and Clash of Clans.
Meanwhile, Nintendo’s Switch services seem to be struggling, with Nintendo US confirming that an ongoing network issue is affecting its online features.
Outside gaming, the disruption has spread across other major platforms and apps. Canva, Flickr, Snapchat, Amazon.com, Prime Video, and Alexa are among those currently facing issues, according to data tracked by Downdetector and reported by CNN.
Amazon confirms outage issues
Amazon Web Services has confirmed widespread operational issues affecting several of its services, particularly in North Virginia (US-EAST-1), one of its biggest data regions.
In its first update, posted at 12:11 AM PDT, AWS said it was “investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region” and promised another update within the hour.
By 2:01 AM PDT, AWS followed up to say it had “identified a potential root cause” for the issue, which appeared to be connected to DNS resolution problems affecting DynamoDB API endpoints in the same region. The company added that the problem was also impacting other AWS services and that “global services or features that rely on US-EAST-1 endpoints such as IAM updates and DynamoDB Global tables may also be experiencing issues.”
During this time, users may be unable to create or update support cases, with AWS recommending that customers “continue to retry any failed requests” while recovery efforts continue.
What does this mean?
In simple terms, AWS’s North Virginia data centre, one of its core hubs, is experiencing problems with how it connects and routes information (known as DNS resolution). This technical failure affects the databases and systems that thousands of online services rely on to stay online.
Because so many games and apps, including Fortnite, Roblox, and Palworld, depend on AWS servers to manage accounts, multiplayer connections, and cloud data, any disruption in this region can cause widespread downtime around the world.
In short, if AWS has a hiccup, much of the internet feels it.
The outage has been resolved on 20 October 3:53 PM PDT, and services for apps and games affected have been restored.
