Someone definitely unplugged something they shouldn’t have. This morning the worldwide internet saw some major outages after Amazon’s AWS server farms suffered a whoopsie, taking down big-name games like Fortnite and Roblox, and as Eurogamer spotted, Palworld, Clash Royale and various Nintendo online services. Most of these have since recovered.
Update: Fortnite has recovered, with multiplayer matches working once again. Nintendo is also back online, after both Switch and Switch 2 network services went offline for about four hours this morning.
✅ 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/5hhpG5UKfj
— Fortnite Status (@FortniteStatus) October 20, 2025
For fans of brainrot, it seems Roblox is now back online, albeit chugging a little. Er, yay? Palworld is also reporting that it’s back online and multiplayer is working as normal.
However, the most serious outage is still affecting me: I cannot get Connections to run on my New York Times puzzle app, and frankly I’m struggling to cope.
It seems the issue has taken place in Northern Virginia, where Amazon reports “multiple services” are down following “increased error rates and latencies.” This all started about four hours ago in Amazon’s US-EAST-1 region, specifically the “DynamoDB endpoint,” which sounds painful. The 4.26 a.m. ET update explained, “Engineers were immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue, and fully understanding the root cause,” later noting that the cause was related to “DNS resolution” of said endpoint. Throughout the early hours of the morning, Amazon has continued to update, explaining that issues are being resolved and everything is slowly getting back online, but it’s a slow process.
Given the speed with which things are being recovered, this doesn’t look like a significant attack or long-term problem, but rather yet another useful example of how just a couple of corporations now control access to the vast majority of the internet we usually take for granted.
Updated: 10/20/2025, 9.15 a.m. ET: The post has been updated to say that Fortnite is back online.
Updated: 10/20/2025, 9.32 a.m. ET: The post has once more been updated to report that Nintendo is now back online, and to reframe the post and headline to reflect that the issues are now mostly fixed.
