Thousands of players across the United States and other regions reported widespread disruptions Tuesday affecting popular online games including ARC Raiders, Fortnite and Rocket League, triggering speculation of a broader Amazon Web Services outage affecting games.
Complaints surged on outage tracking platforms and social media as users described login failures, matchmaking errors and repeated network timeouts during peak holiday traffic.
Amazon Web Services, however, disputed claims of a system wide failure, saying its core services were operating normally despite reports suggesting otherwise.
The disruption appeared to ripple across the Epic Games ecosystem, impacting several high-profile multiplayer titles that rely on cloud infrastructure for authentication and matchmaking.
According to Downdetector, more than four thousand users in the United States reported issues related to AWS connectivity, while reports tied specifically to ARC Raiders approached thirty five thousand at their peak.
Epic Games titles including Fortnite, Rocket League and Fall Guys experienced varying degrees of disruption. Players reported “servers not responding” messages, failed logins and stalled purchases on the Epic Games Store.
In a statement posted on social media, AWS rejected claims of an outage. “No, that’s false,” the company said. “AWS services are operating normally today, but an event elsewhere on the internet has prompted some inaccurate speculation on social media.
The only resource on the internet that provides accurate data on the availability of our services is the AWS Health Dashboard.”
Technology analysts said the confusion highlights how complex modern internet outages can be, particularly when multiple services depend on shared infrastructure.
“Not every gaming disruption tied to cloud hosted services equals an AWS outage affecting games,” said Michael Raines, a cloud infrastructure analyst based in San Francisco.
“A problem with routing, DNS resolution or third party network providers can produce the same symptoms for users without AWS itself being down.”
Raines added that social media often amplifies outage narratives before technical causes are fully understood, especially during high traffic periods such as holidays.
Downdetector data showed a sharp spike in outage reports within a short window, a pattern commonly seen during regional network disruptions rather than global cloud failures.
Similar spikes have occurred in past incidents where game publishers or content delivery networks experienced temporary congestion.
In October, Amazon confirmed a separate AWS outage affecting services such as Snapchat and Reddit after a Domain Name System issue prevented applications from reaching DynamoDB APIs.
That incident caused broader service failures across industries, unlike the more narrowly focused gaming disruptions reported this week.
Players described mounting frustration as repeated login attempts failed.
“I kept getting the ART00004 network timeout error on ARC Raiders for nearly an hour,” said Daniel Perez, a college student in Texas.
“It looked like everything was down, so people immediately blamed AWS.”
A Fortnite player in Ohio, Sarah Whitman, said matchmaking errors disrupted planned holiday gaming sessions. “It was one error after another. Even the store wasn’t loading properly.”
Epic Games acknowledged service instability on its public status page but did not directly attribute the problems to an AWS outage affecting games.
Industry observers said most similar incidents are resolved within one to three hours as traffic stabilizes or routing issues are corrected.
Players experiencing server side errors were advised by developers to avoid repeated login attempts, which can trigger automated security flags.
Experts expect continued scrutiny of cloud dependency as online games increasingly rely on centralized infrastructure. “The resilience of these ecosystems will remain a key issue as live service gaming grows,” Raines said.
The reported disruptions affecting ARC Raiders, Fortnite and Rocket League underscored the challenges of diagnosing real time internet failures in a tightly interconnected digital landscape.
While user reports fueled claims of an AWS outage affecting games, Amazon Web Services maintained that its systems were functioning normally.
As investigations continue, the episode reflects ongoing tensions between user experience, platform transparency and the complexity of global cloud networks.
