The Epic Games Store is currently experiencing logins, library, and purchase issues amid wider a wider internet outage. Other known impacted services include Asana and Slack, distressing project managers everywhere.
This outage comes just a week after an Amazon Web Services outage affected Twitch, PSN, Xbox Live, and more. It seems AWS is responsible for this latest upset as well, as reported by Action News Jax.
This is the third outage caused by an Amazon Web Services failure in just a few weeks. The first caused problems with Prime, Disney+, and Netflix, while the second affected many gaming services as mentioned above. It shows how fragile the internet's infrastructure really is, as one service going down can have a knock-on effect that disrupts many others.
Many large websites and online platforms are hosted by just a few companies. Amazon Web Services is a large cloud computing service provider, so when it goes down, so do all the sites it hosts.
Workflow software like Trello and Asana are down, and popular work messaging platform Slack is also facing issues. Problems like these can slow businesses down and cost them a lot of money, so every minute AWS means financial loss for others.
Amazon officials confirmed that "launch failures and networking connectivity issues" were reported this morning on the East Coast of the US. At around 8am EST, they said they were investigating a power outage in a data centre. At about 8:40am, they confirmed they had restored power, and around 9:15am they said that services were recovered for the majority of customers.
However, some people on Twitter are still claiming the Epic Games Store is down for them, meaning they are unable to download the free game of the day on offer as part of Epic's 15 days of free games promotion.
It is an issue that people are unable to access their bought and downloaded games when the Epic Games Store servers are down. Hopefully this month of frequent outages will prompt Epic to but some failsafe measures in place so that people are free to play whenever they want.