If you're having trouble accessing your favourite online platforms right now, you're not alone. An Amazon Web Services Outage has caused huge swathes of the PlayStation Network, Xbox Live, Twitch, Halo, Apex Legends, and EA servers to go down.
For me, here in the UK, Xbox Live and Twitch both seem to be fine, but PSN is definitely experiencing problems - I can browse the store page and search for things but I can't download anything. The outages seem to be regional rather than global, but if you're having trouble with anything, this is why.
If you're wondering what Apex has to do with Amazon, you're not alone. The internet's infrastructure is actually quite delicate, as recent previous outages have proved. Many large websites and online platforms are hosted by just a few companies. Amazon Web Services is a large cloud computing service provider. Akamai, one of the world's biggest internet service providers, was responsible for summer's PSN and Steam outages.
Downdetector, a website that shows information regarding which web services are up and running, saw spikes in users reporting issues with Amazon Web Services at about 3pm GMT today. This is the second outage AWS has had in just a week, with the previous one occurring on December 9 and lasting for seven hours. Apparently, as well as video game platforms and services, Netflix, Doordash, and Hulu are also having problems right now.
Fortunately, even though many online services are down, it seems you can still play downloaded PS+ games and Game Pass titles, even if the online functionality doesn't work, so there's no need to panic just yet.
Now would be a great time to get stuck in to some great single-player games you may have been putting off. There are plenty of beginner-friendly action-adventure games that you could sink several evenings into - but hopefully this outage doesn't last that long. You could also revisit old childhood classics like GTA San Andreas.