In the early hours of Monday, October 20, 2025, a major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) caused widespread disruption across the internet, with issues traced to its US-East-1 region. The outage has triggered a chain reaction of failures around the world, affecting banks, government services, mobile networks, and social platforms like Snapchat.
Gaming has also been hit hard, with many popular online titles running into login errors, connection failures, and broken matchmaking services. Here is a breakdown of the games affected so far.
Affected games and platforms
The games and platforms currently affected include:
- Fortnite – Reported login and connectivity issues
- Palworld – Reports of failure to connect
- Wordle
- Rocket League
- Clash Royale
- Clash of Clans
- Pokémon GO
- Lost Ark
- Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds
- Epic Games Store
- PlayStation Network
[Network Outage - Resolved] We have confirmed that the multiplayer connection issues for Palworld, which occurred today due to a global network outage, have now been resolved. You can now enjoy multiplayer as normal. Thank you for your continued support of Palworld.October 20, 2025
Palword has just reported the issues are resolved, thankfully but the outage did last over two hours.
⚠️ 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
All of these rely on Amazon Web Services in some capacity. Some outages have been confirmed by developers, while others are based on user reports. Severity varies between titles, and some are already showing signs of recovery. Fortunately for Xbox players, Xbox services are currently unaffected, as they run on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform rather than AWS.
Why online games rely heavily on AWS
Amazon Web Services provides the backend infrastructure for a huge portion of online multiplayer games, and when it goes down, it takes essential features with it. Most games rely on AWS for player logins, matchmaking servers, cloud saves, and even in-game purchases. If any part of that chain breaks, the entire game can become unplayable, even if it installs locally on your device.
Outages like this are not new, and we have seen similar incidents in the past from Amazon, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Still, it is a reminder of how much modern gaming depends on always-online systems. As the industry continues to move toward a digital-only future and cloud services, it raises valid concerns about reliability. If a single provider has a problem, millions of players feel it instantly.
Amazon provides recovery update but issues continue
Amazon has confirmed the issue, stating it is experiencing increased error rates and latency across its services. It says it has identified a potential cause and is working on a fix, but services have been down for several hours and are still not fully restored.
There are signs of improvement, but recovery is ongoing. Amazon says it is currently working through a backlog of requests, which is causing slow performance and delays for connected apps and games.
Some titles are starting to come back online, but there is still no official timeline for when everything will return to normal. Users can follow progress through Amazon’s Service Health Dashboard, which is being updated throughout the outage.
A reminder that modern gaming is fragile
Outages like this are a reminder that modern gaming is more fragile than it appears. Most games now depend on a constant internet connection in some way, even those that are not traditionally online experiences. When cloud services fail, everything from login attempts to saved data can stop working.
Many of today’s biggest titles rely on third-party cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure. This shift has made it easier for developers to scale online features, but it also means a single outage can impact millions of players around the world at the same time.
This comes at a time when physical game ownership is at its lowest, and more titles require online authentication just to launch. Live service games are the most obviously affected during outages, but even single-player games are not immune. Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, for example, locked players out of its solo content due to a server login issue. Even Wordle struggled, although in that case, it makes more sense as it pulls new words from the cloud.
If you were affected by today’s outage, feel free to let us know in the comments or reach out online via X (Formerly Twitter) or BlueSky.
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