UPDATE 13:30 ET / 18:30 GMT: The official AWS dashboard says: "We are seeing impact to multiple AWS APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region. This issue is also affecting some of our monitoring and incident response tooling, which is delaying our ability to provide updates. We have identified the root cause and are actively working towards recovery."
Outage reports are falling, with some websites such as Facebook and Disney Plus almost back to normal.
Original story below.
Amazon Web Services is by some distance the biggest server or cloud computing company on the planet: As of April 2021, it accounts for 32% of the $42 billion cloud computing market. Today AWS has gone down and at the time of writing remains so—we'll update when that changes—and an absolute bundle of other platforms that depend on its service are also now unavailable.
You can monitor the outage here and, as that page shows, AWS's problems have struck down the following dominoes:
- League of Legends
- League of Legends Wild Rift
- PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds
- Valorant
- Dead by Daylight
- Clash of Clans
- Destiny 2
The list goes on. Platforms like UPlay and the Epic Games Store are down, while mega-publishers like Bethesda are also affected. AWS boasted in 2019 that over 90% of the world's biggest game companies use its services, so the number of games that will be affected by this in some way is difficult to be exact about: A lot.
AWS appears to have stopped functioning at around 15:24 GMT (07:24 PT), the outage appears to be US-based, and the AWS Support account has yet to address the problem or its severity.
Needless to say this isn't just having an impact on the world of games: Amazon's own services such as Prime Video are down, while other big-hitters like Disney+, Tindr, and Capital One are suffering. Most notably, the Amazon website itself will not allow product searches: At this time of year particularly, it will be losing millions of dollars by the minute.
We've contacted AWS for comment and will update with any response.
