A major server outage at Amazon Web Services has seen a large number of games brought down, including League of Legends and Valorant.
In yet another example of why the monopolizing of the video game industry is bad, problems at Amazon Web Services (AWS) have brought several massive games to their knees. In total, a couple dozen games have not been able to access online services due to the outage, including the likes of League of Legends, Valorant, and Destiny 2.
In addition, major gaming platforms like UPlay and the Epic Games Store are also down, with many publishers experiencing severe problems. The issues are all linked to AWS, which is reportedly used by more than 90% of games companies worldwide. Why so many gaming companies rely on Amazon is, of course, a matter of market dominance.
In the end, gaming companies need to purchase server space to host the massive games that they develop and sell. Often even big publishers like Activision and Bethesda will spend money on renting server space and various services from companies like Amazon and Google, so that they don't have to invest in the server infrastructure themselves.
The good thing about this is that it makes bigger online games possible for smaller developers and publishers, especially as they purely have to cough up the cost of renting the space, rather than the insane cost of building a massive server themselves. The downside? Well, the downside is two-fold.
The first major problem is that the industry continues to get further monopolized and controlled by giants like Amazon, Tencent, and Google, whom control large swathes of the industry. These companies own such a large amount of the market that even huge developers need to be subservient to them, or risk having their rates increased, or even being kicked from the servers.
The second major problem is pretty simple, and it's what we're experiencing tonight: if one, two, or even three companies control such a large amount of the technological infrastructure, if it fails, everything fails. That's why so many games have gone down, and it also explains why Disney+, Amazon Prime and more are also down. It's all linked to AWS, so it all goes down together.
Service degradation: Degraded Contact HandlingTue, 07 Dec 2021 09:08:50 PSThttps://t.co/LPTxCi9PyqWe are experiencing degraded Contact handling by agents in the US-EAST-1 Region. Agents may experience issues logging in or being connected with end-customers.
— AWS Service Status (@StatusAws) December 7, 2021
As of writing, AWS is still down and clearly in deep trouble. It has been a number of ours at this point (hence our deciding to write this article), and thus the games that were effected, are still effected. It doesn't seem that Halo Infinite's Multiplayer has been effected, so just go and play that instead.
If you want to check whether AWS is still down, you can do that via DownDetector, that has been monitoring the problems closely since they started around 4PM CEST, on December 7. You can also monitor it via the AWS Twitter page, accessible through the above-embedded Tweet. Don't stress, they'll sort it out, just go and play Halo. It's better than League anyway.
I'm joking, I'm joking, don't get your knickers in a knot!