Today is a bad day for gamers, and maybe you’ve already realized it. And for many, accessing your favorite games was impossiblethanks to an error message. A massive outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers appears to have occurred, creating temporary chaos on the internet. Especially in the video game industry.
So games like Fortnite, Clash Royale or Roblox encounter serious problems working as they should all over the world. It didn’t take Epic Games long to make themselves heard and confirm the matter: a general Internet outage affects loginsdirectly related to AWS. And of course, Amazon also did the sameleaving reports every few hours on the company’s progress in resolving the problem. But why does this damage so many services?
What is AWS and why a failure in its service affects the Internet so much
🚨 A widespread service provider outage is also affecting the Epic Games Store and Epic Online Services, impeding a number of areas, including logins.
We are investigating the matter and will provide an update as soon as we have more information.
— EOS Status (@EOSStatus) October 20, 2025
The origin of this digital blackout leads us to understand what AWS really is. In simple terms, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is like the largest owner of the Internet. Most companies, including gaming giants, don’t build their own expensive data centers. Instead, they rent computing power, storage space, and tools from Amazon.
The current issue originated in one of the most critical AWS regions, located in Northern Virginia. According to company reports, The error was related to the domain name system or DNS.
To understand this better, let’s imagine for just a moment that DNS is the address book of the Internet; When it fails, even if your data house is still standing, no one knows how to get there. This is exactly what happened: games failed to find player account information or virtual worlds.
AWS centralization can be a problem when your house burns down
Half the internet just went down, it looks like Amazon’s web services had a catastrophic crash. Things like Signal and numerous AI services are also down. pic.twitter.com/TptCPcbYVW
— Chris Bartlett (@BartlettChrisJ) October 20, 2025
What this incident makes clear is that the Internet has deposited much of its functioning into a limited selection of tech giants like Amazon. The problem of the cloud is evident, given the convenience and efficiency of centralizing services linked to providers such as AWS makes the consequences of one’s failures felt almost everywhereon a global scale.
What should we do about this problem? Unfortunately, in these cases, the solution is almost completely out of our hands. Recovery is a slow and gradual process, already underway since the failure was reported. So the only thing left for us is to wait.
Although Amazon has implemented fixes and has begun to see signs of recovery, the systems must process a huge queue of accumulated requests. This means this some users will be able to reconnect before others. We will have to be patient and wait for the green light to come back on on the servers that, without us seeing it, keep our digital world running.
