An Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage affected a majority of websites, games, and online services today. A good chunk of the internet was offline today for a couple of hours, and the game Rematch was also affected. Players were unable to get into matches, and some were unable to launch the game at all. According to the official Twitter handle, things are back up and running at the time of writing.
What Other Games Were Affected, And Why?
For those unfamiliar with AWS, think of it as subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms, servers, and APIs to businesses. They provide computing power, storage, networking, databases, all delivered from a large global network of data centers. Without getting too technical, the AWS service status page reports that the cause of the outage today was due to an “underlying DNS” issue that has been since mitigated on October 20, 3:35 AM PDT.
This outage affected a majority of the popular websites and services: YouTube, Snapchat, Reddit, Netflix, Disney+, Airbnb, Pinterest, Twitch, etc. If you’re more concerned about gaming, services like the PlayStation Network, Xbox, Steam, Epic Games, Fortnite, and Roblox were also affected by this outage. Talk about a rough start to the week.
An interesting takeaway here is that the region with the most issues was US-EAST-1, but it’s a global region on AWS that is sort of a “control plane” for many of Amazon’s critical, global-level services. The AWS team is hard at work trying to mitigate any issues that are popping up, but this will have ripple effects for many websites and services. I even experienced a bit of downtime as I was attempting to log in to Slack today. It might be a good idea to stay away from online gaming for today.
So yeah, if you were experiencing issues with Rematch this morning, don’t worry — it wasn’t just you. And despite the fact that most have said the issue is resolved, there seem to be residual effects that are still present.
