Third AWS outage in two weeks takes down multiple games and services

New World
(Image credit: Amazon Games Studio)

Amazon Web Services has just had its third outage in just over two weeks, rendering games like Fortnite and New World unplayable.

The fault is down to power issues at one of Amazon's data centers in North Viriginia. DownDetector is showing the issues mostly affecting the Epic Games Store including Fortnite and Rocket League, along with Amazon's own New World. Crusader Kings developer Paradox Interactive warned players they may not be able to log in and use services right now thanks to the problems. The outage is also affecting a couple of mobile games like Clash of Clans and Simpson Tapped Out, but this time most of the reported downtime seems to be happening in non-gaming territories.

Amazon's service status page says it's aware of the current outages and is currently making progress "in restoring power to the affected data center." Power should be restored "to the majority of instances and networking devices within the affected data center," with the page reporting "early signs of recovery." Apparently it'll take a little while longer to see full improvement and hiccups will persist throughout the next few hours.

It's not been a good month for AWS—the beginning of the month saw dozens of the biggest games go down as its US-EAST-1 region servers crapped out, and just over a week later an outage at the US-WEST-2 servers saw a temporary Twitch blackout and numerous games once again suffering downtime.

Mollie Taylor
Features Producer

Mollie spent her early childhood deeply invested in games like Killer Instinct, Toontown and Audition Online, which continue to form the pillars of her personality today. She joined PC Gamer in 2020 as a news writer and now lends her expertise to write a wealth of features, guides and reviews with a dash of chaos. She can often be found causing mischief in Final Fantasy 14, using those experiences to write neat things about her favourite MMO. When she's not staring at her bunny girl she can be found sweating out rhythm games, pretending to be good at fighting games or spending far too much money at her local arcade.