An enormous Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage had a huge impact across the internet yesterday, and gaming did not escape the damage.
Games of all types, from Fortnite to Wordle to Roblox were affected by the AWS outage. Problems started at about 7.30am BST (that's 2.30am ET) yesterday, October 20, when gaming services started having huge spikes on the outage-detecting website Downdetector.
The root of the problems lies with Amazon Web Services, but the Amazon Web Services dashboard only described an "operational issue" in North Virginia as the cause of the problem.
The effect of the outage was massive and impacted millions of people across the internet, and in gaming, folks were just flat-out unable to play huge games like Battlefield 6 and Fortnite .
Thankfully, the problems have largely been resolved - though I wouldn't be surprised if we see some blips still occur in the near future - and normal service has broadly been resumed. You can see here how we covered it and some of the 'highlights' through the event.
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Gaming services hit by massive AWS outage
A huge Amazon Web Services (AWS) problem started earlier this morning at about 7.30am BST (2.30am ET) and has seen a whole host of gaming services and games hit by interruptions and straight-up failures.
This will be huge today with millions of gamers trying to play online or affect storefronts on the daily. Right now, we can see that the likes of Fortnite, Roblox, Wordle, and the Epic Game Store - and many, many more - have been affected.
Let's do the rounds and see what the state of play is and if there's any fix on the horizon.
Fortnite massively affected
One of the very biggest games in the world has been affected by the AWS outage: Fortnite is currently down for many.
My colleague Rhys just sent me the above screenshot showing that he just flat-out cannot sign in to the game.
The error reads: "Unable to sign in to your account for online services. Please try again later."
Fortnite being down is partnered by Epic's own storefront failing to load or let me log in online.
The above error screen is what I get and have had all morning...
PS Network seems fine...
In slightly better news, the PlayStation Network seems to be fine - at least for me and many others, despite there being some reports of outages.
From my testing however, the store, games, and PS direct, and all my account gumpf is fine - thankfully.
An update from AWS
We have an update from AWS!
Reporting at 2.27aam PT (that's 10.27am BST), AWS said:
"We are seeing significant signs of recovery. Most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests. We will continue to provide additional information."
Fingers crossed that means we're now coming oput the end of this...
Cannot go fast right now in Sonic...
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds has been affected by the AWS outage too with my colleague Rhys sharing this screenshot showing that the connection to the server is just failing.
Phew! Wordle is back…
Wordle was badly hit by the AWS outage earlier, but appears to be back online now.
Though the page itself – hosted on the New York Times' gaming site – loaded, it wouldn't let users log in, meaning they wouldn't be able to extend their all-important streaks.
The site now seems to be working normally, so you can go ahead and get your daily fix. (And if you need help, make sure you check out our Wordle today page for hints and discussion of the game.)
Thanks for the above update to our Global Editor-in-Chief, and Wordle warlock, Marc McLaren!
If you play Amazon games, you may be hit hard...
Perhaps somewhat predictably, if you're someone who plays Amazon games it looks like you're being hit hard right now.
The above image is from the Throne and Liberty X / Twitter account, and remains the latest update on the game which appears to acknowledge widespread problems for players trying to login and play...
Same goes for Lost Ark...
Unsurprisingly, the same goes for Amazon's other big game, Lost Ark, with the official X / Twitter account offering an almost identical statement acknowledging the problems.
Roblox looks to have recovered
While the official Roblox X / Twitter account didn't post any updates about the state of Roblox today, it looks like users have reported it recovering.
It's also got a huge downward trend on Downdetector which means things are looking good for the immensely popular game platform.
We might be past the worst of it, folks
I think we may well be coming out the otherside of this massive AWS outage that's affected loads of gaming services, everyone.
Downdetector graphs across nearly all major gaming storefronts, platforms, and games are showing downward trends and we here at TechRadar are accessing a number of them fine ourselves now.
Fingers crossed that the worst of it is over...
Fortnite remains down though...
It looks as though the huge battle royale game that is Fortnite is still down, however.
The above screenshot was from a few minutes ago, and taken by a colleague of mine showing that it is still impossible to sign in for some folks.
That last post about Fortnite is still backed up by the latest statement from the official Fortnite Status X / Twitter page, by the way. See that below:
⚠️ An outage affecting several services on the internet is also impacting Fortnite log-ins. We're investigating this now, and will update you when we have more details.October 20, 2025
Elsewhere it looks like Reddit is having real trouble...
Adjacent to all the gaming chaos, which looks to be recovering, thankfully, it does look like Reddit is having an outage for the ages too right now.
You can follow that outage and get all the latest information here: Massive AWS outage takes down Reddit, Snapchat, Alexa, Ring and much of the internet – all the latest updates live
Fortnite is still very much down
We're still checking regular and Fortnite is still throwing up "Servers not responding" errors on the login screen.
The Epic Games Storefront online is back up for me however, so hopefully that's a good sign for Fortnite!
AWS update
Okay, we've got another update from the horse's mouth.
A new post on the AWS dashboard from 4.08am PDT / 7.08am ET / 12.08pm BST says: "We are continuing to work towards full recovery for EC2 launch errors, which may manifest as an Insufficient Capacity Error.
"Additionally, we continue to work toward mitigation for elevated polling delays for Lambda".
It's all a bit technical, but a big takeaway here is that EC2 is short for Elastic Compute Cloud, which provides virtual servers in the cloud for running apps and hosting data. This likely explains why so many apps, like Snapchat and others, are having ongoing problems.
As a result, we might see the disturbance last a little while longer.
It appears as though Fortnite may be back...
✅ The service provider outage is resolved and Fortnite is back online! Players should again be able to log-in and matchmake without issue.We'll continue to monitor this to ensure service remains stable. 🫡 https://t.co/5hhpG5UKfjOctober 20, 2025
OK, it looks as though Fortnite may be on the return!
The official Fortnite Status account on X / Twitter, has stated that players should be able to log in and matchmake with issue after the service provider outage has been "resolved".
The full statement is above but things could be on the up now...
It's a bit slow for us, but Fortnite is back...
My colleague Rhys has just tried Fortnite again, and we can confirm that the game is back online!
It's definitely a bit slow, but it's definitely here and you can get going on games and matchmaking. Huzzah!
Other major stores and services seem fine
We've been constantly checking the affected games and services that we have access to, and everything broadly looks okay from a gaming perspective.
We'll keep tabs on everything we can but hopefully things are looking much improved and on the up.
We're not out of the woods yet, perhaps
Looks like AWS are suggesting we're not out of the woods yet, and might see conitnued disruption...
In a statement from 7.14am PT / 10.14 ET / 15.14 BST, AWS said: "We can confirm significant API errors and connectivity issues across multiple services in the US-EAST-1 Region. We are investigating and will provide further update in 30 minutes or soon if we have additional information."
Uh oh, looks like Battlefield 6 might be affected...
As per the above screenshot taken from Downdetector it appears that Battlefield 6 may be being affected by today's outage - suddenly, and on a massive scale!
I will try to check this out imminently to confirm either way from what I can experience, but definitely something to be aware of.
Battlefield 6 latest...
OK, it did look bad when we just checked Battlefield 6, and while we were actually able to join a game, it's now hanging again and failing!
Looks like it could be a bad time to be an online Battlefield 6 player...
Battlefield 6 coming and going
OK, it appears that Battlefield 6 is coming and going a bit now. It's occasionally working for us, but still sometimes not letting you on.
Battlefield 6 still being temperamental
Someone else has told me that they still can't get into Battlefield 6 so your problems may continue if you're looking to play the mega online shooter.
And with that, I'm off
I have to leave now, but will leave this blog in the capable hands of my colleague Jacob.
Otherwise, this blog will still be a great resource of information about what happened today.
Hello there – Jacob Krol here, and we're still seeing reports of outages and persistent issues with Battlefield 6, according to Down Detector. Since the last update, at 1:54PM ET, there are still over 1,000 reports for the title on the site.
There are a few comments in the last 15 or so minutes noting that the service is finally starting to become available again.
While hours have passed since the initial start of AWS updates and a few hours since Amazon's most recent update, we'll paste that below. It seems that many issues with both Battlefield, Fortnite, Epic Games, and Roblox have improved – though it's not a complete fix.
Reported outages for these games and storefronts have recovered a bit, and I was able to load into a Fortnite match as well. Even so, though, Twitch and the PlayStation Network still seem to be encountering issues.
"We have continued to reduce throttles for EC2 instance launches in the US-EAST-1 Region and we continue to make progress toward pre-event levels in all Availability Zones (AZs). AWS services such as ECS and Glue, which rely on EC2 instance launches will recover as the successful instance launch rate improves. We see full recovery for Lambda invocations and are working through the backlog of queued events, which we expect to be fully processed in approximately in the next two hours. We will provide another update by 2:30 PM PDT."
Well, that was exciting, wasn't it? I mean, in a largely awful way, of course.
Thankfully, it looks like much of the problems affecting games and gaming stores and services have passed! Huzzah!
