From Fortnite to Palworld, the AWS outage has ruined plenty of gamers' mornings

A major Amazon Web Services outage has caused chaos across the internet over the last few hours, and that means dozens of notable games like Fortnite and Palworld are struggling to get players onto their servers. The entire Epic Games Store has been experiencing issues too. While things still appear a bit patchy at the time of writing (3am PT / 6am ET / 11am BST on Monday October 20) AWS has just announced that it's seeing "significant signs of recovery."

The outage has impacted everything from social media platforms like Snapchat, to Ring doorbell connectivity, to some of the biggest multiplayer games around. The AWS issues began in the middle of the night for those in the US and the early morning for those in the UK and Europe, so it missed the typical peak for most online games. Nevertheless, with huge player bases around the world, the effect for some of the big guns like Roblox, Fortnite, Palworld, and Rocket League will have still been felt by millions of gamers. At the time of writing, the issues have been ongoing for around three hours now.

However, it seems like your frantic searching of the Fortnite server status will be coming to an end pretty soon. AWS' most recent update on its service health page, posted at 2:27am PT / 5:27am ET / 10:27am BST, claims that it's "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."

Several others titles have also been impacted by the AWS outage. Realistic WW2 shooter Hell Let Loose, Sloclap's excellent soccer game Rematch, and dino survival game Ark: Survival Evolved have all confirmed their servers have been impacted.

We've seen big outages like this before, and typically things get resolved within a couple of hours, so this isn't an unprecedented blip. Even though we've been through this plenty of times in the past, it does always feel like a tech apocalypse is happening at the moment, such is our reliance on it all. 'What do you mean I can't hot drop Utopia City and die instantly? This must be the end.'

If you're still struggling to get into any of your faves, default to some of the best single-player games for a while. Or go and touch that weird green stuff outside, for a morning… When everything does spring back to life, you'll be safe to hope back into the best free PC games around.

Are there any other games you've been unable to get into this morning? Let us know in the PCGamesN Discord server.