PlayStation, Xbox, And More Major Platforms Hit By Network Outages

If you’ve been trying to play something online, stream a show, or even just post something on Snapchat this morning but you’ve not been having any luck, don’t worry, it’s not something you’re doing. There are currently widespread internet outages in certain regions that have knocked various services offline, including the PlayStation Network, Amazon Prime Video, and seemingly a lot more.

Down Detector, which monitors when certain services are down and flags the problem to let people know it’s a wider issue and not something they might need to fix, has been working over time for the past few hours. Steam, the PlayStation Network, its Xbox counterpart, Fortnite’s servers, Apex Legends, and Rocket League are just some of the video game services that you might not be able to gain access to right now.

An Amazon Server Appears To Be To Blame For The Outages

Thankfully, the problem doesn’t appear to be a global issue, at least not for all of the services that have been affected. While a lot of people in the US seem to be struggling, here in the UK, the only platform I’ve tested of the ones seemingly affected by the outages that isn’t working as it should be is Prime Video. PlayStation, Xbox, and Steam are all fine, although again, that is certainly not the case for all regions right now.

The root cause of the problem appears to be an Amazon web server in Northern Virginia. The server’s health page was last updated at 4:26 am EST, at which point Amazon acknowledged “significant error rates for requests made to the DynamoDB endpoint in the US-EAST-1 Region”. So, if you’re on the East Coast of the US right now and can’t play games online, or even stream the latest episode of Gen V while you wait for this all to blow over, this explains why.

How long this problem will persist remains unclear. Fortnite Status, an account officially affiliated with Fortnite that addresses server outages and other problems with the game, has acknowledged the problem. It notes that Fortnite is down in certain regions due to the same issue plaguing pretty much everything else on the internet right now, and that it is investigating the problem.

It can investigate all it wants, but until the issue is fixed at the source, and the server affected is back up and operational, the problems with Fortnite and everything else taken down by the problem will persist. Let’s just hope this is an issue that’s mostly fixed by the time everyone on the East Coast starts waking up, and not one we’re still struggling with for weeks like the not-so-great PSN outage of 2011.