A number of people using Amazon Web Services reported it going down earlier today, causing a widespread outage of various internet services. Given how many pies Amazon has its fingers in, the effects appear to have blanketed a significant chunk of the online community. Video game fans have been unexpectedly hard-hit as it turns out that Amazon Web Services took a number of popular gaming services down with it.
Although Amazon has produced relatively few games using its own gaming division, Amazon Games, a number of blockbuster titles and services use technology owned by the company. These associated games can be affected by Amazon going down. This list includes both the popular streaming service Twitch and the battle royale shooter Apex Legends.
Apparently, some players had trouble connecting to Apex Legends during the Amazon Web Services outage. According to the official Twitter account for Alpha Intel, an account that shares Titanfall and Apex Legends-related news, this is because Apex Legends uses Amazon Web Services to operate. Gamers may not have immediately drawn a connection between these two services both being down because many games use Amazon Web Services, and Apex Legends is just one of them.
Fans of Apex Legends may be used to the game going down unexpectedly, as veteran online gamers are frequently exposed to server issues. According to Alpha Intel, Amazon Web Services is now back online, so gamers should be able to connect to Apex Legends once again. Any further issues with the game going down are likely due to problems on Respawn Entertainment's end rather than Amazon's. Regardless, Apex Legends players may have taken an important lesson from this outage on how interconnected the online ecosystem has become over the years--and how important Amazon has made itself to many avenues of online activity, including gaming.
As of writing, it appears that some of the other services impacted by Amazon Web Services going down include PlayStation Network, Quickbooks Online, Xbox Live, Halo, EA, and Call of Duty. Past issues with the service have led to problems with Disney Plus, League of Legends, PUBG, and Valorant on top of issues with Amazon's online shopping service. One user replying to the Apex Intel alert observed that Apex Legends goes down when Amazon is down, but the game also goes down when Google goes down. The frustrated fan went on to theorize that Apex Legends is just always ready to stop working at any given moment.