Massive AWS Outage Disrupts PlayStation, Fortnite, Roblox, and Pokémon Go for Millions

Amazon Web Services (AWS) faced a widespread outage on Monday, knocking some of the internet’s biggest gaming platforms and apps offline. PlayStation Network, Fortnite, Roblox, Pokémon Go, Epic Games, Rocket League, Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, and even Wordle all saw major disruptions, with millions of players shut out, at least for a few hours. The chaos stemmed from issues in AWS’s ‘US East 1’ region. Because so much of the web relies on this particular slice of Amazon’s cloud, the impact was immediate and overwhelming.

What Broke, and Who Felt It Most

Outage monitoring service Downdetector tracked over 4 million user reports in just one morning. For comparison, it usually gets about 1.8 million reports during an entire day. The apps and games hardest hit were those that lean heavily on AWS’s cloud for real-time connections and data, think online multiplayer giants, messaging, and mobile apps.

If you were in the Eastern US, you probably felt it. The outage mostly spared other regions, so global users may have logged on with no clue anything was wrong.

Gaming wasn’t the only casualty. Other major services halted by the AWS failure included Snapchat, Zoom, Slack, Duolingo, and banks like Halifax, Lloyds, and the Bank of Scotland. Even the workplace and education platforms that fuel remote work fell on their faces for a chunk of the morning.

What Caused the Meltdown, and When Did It Get Fixed?

Amazon’s engineers were quick to hunt down the issue. Around 10 am BST, the company said it had “identified a potential root cause for error rates for the DynamoDB APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region.” DynamoDB is a core piece of AWS’s cloud infrastructure and powers countless apps behind the scenes.

By 10:39 am, Amazon updated its status to say “significant signs of recovery” were already showing. “Most requests should now be succeeding,” the company reported. Still, there was a backlog of queued requests that engineers needed to clear, so some players and users had to sit tight awhile longer.

Downdetector’s tracking graphs captured the storm, and the calm that followed. Initial spikes signaled the extent of the disruption, but by late morning, those numbers started dropping back toward normal.

Amazon promised, “We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests. We will continue to provide additional information.” That transparency was small comfort for those locked out of their favorite games or crucial communication tools, but it was a sign things were moving in the right direction.

This cloud hiccup marks yet another reminder that when one backbone fails, even for a few hours, the internet’s dominoes can topple fast. Everything from banking to schoolwork and, of course, gaming isn’t quite as invincible as we imagine.