Roblox, Fortnite Coming Back Online After AWS Outage Took Them Down
by Paul Tassi · ForbesIf you logged in to play any number of games this morning, you likely found yourself out of luck, which was also the case if you were using a number of other websites and services (I couldn’t even remote order Starbucks). Games like Roblox, Fortnite, Pokémon GO, Clash Royale and many others were down because of a widespread outage of Amazon Web Services, which is what a large chunk of the internet runs on in 2025.
Well, you’re in luck. Things are starting to get resolved, and games like Fortnite and Roblox are starting to switch the lights back on. While some problems linger, and everything may not be working perfectly, many games are reporting as recently as half an hour ago that they’re working again, and players can once again return.
Many sites and servers are built on the back of Amazon Web Services hosting, so if there are issues with the cloud computing platform, that can sink things entirely. We have seen these kinds of outages with other services like Cloudflare in the past as well, and there is probably no more urgent internet problem possible than getting these situations resolved.
Here’s what Amazon said at 5 AM ET this morning:
“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.”
But some games like Fortnite didn’t report they were back on until about 9 ET, so it can take some time for things like this. Some servies like Roblox are still showing the game down on its server page. This is from Amazon’s latest update:
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“We are making progress on resolving the issue with new EC2 instance launches in the US-EAST-1 Region and are now able to successfully launch new instances in some Availability Zones. We are applying similar mitigations to the remaining impacted Availability Zones to restore new instance launches. As we continue to make progress, customers will see an increasing number of successful new EC2 launches.”
At least in the West, these games being down at least took place early in the morning, rather than during prime gaming time in the afternoon or evening. Other regions were not so lucky.
It’s a reminder of just how much of the internet relies on just a few companies and services, and that includes a large chunk of video games as well. Thankfully, this was not a prolonged outage, and we’ve seen much longer ones in the past.
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