'Don't point finger at us', says AWS as Fortnite, Arc Raiders and other games hit by outage on Christmas

AWS has denied causing a recent major outage. This follows a massive server failure that disrupted multiple games and other online services on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. While thousands of players across the United States and India reported that popular online services, such as Steam, Fortnite, and Arc Raiders, were inaccessible, the world's largest cloud service provider denied any disruption to its infrastructure. This clarification came as a response to monitoring platforms' indication that a central AWS failure was responsible for the technical glitches.The official AWS Newsroom account shared a post on the microblogging platform X (formerly Twitter) denying claims that Amazon’s cloud service was behind the recent outage. Replying to one such speculation, AWS wrote: “@KobeissiLetter No, that's false. 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 go.aws/4jb7PAh”Despite the many user reports, AWS continued to insist that its systems worked flawlessly during the holiday period. The company's rebuttal questions a widespread assumption that the simultaneous service drops all shared a common cause -- a failure within one of the cloud providers. At this time, it remains unclear if the individual platforms experienced separate internal issues or if a different network provider was responsible for the connectivity problems.While AWS did not specify what caused the outage or the speculations surrounding it, the company advised users and organisations to rely on its official status page for accurate, real-time information.The clarification comes after data from the outage-tracking platform Downdetector showed a significant spike in complaints around Christmas, with over 4,000 users reporting problems. Major gaming and digital storefronts were among the most affected services, including Fortnite, Steam, Arc Raiders, Epic Games Store and Rocket League.Steam users worldwide reported experiencing an outage on Christmas Eve. The downtime affected thousands of users for over an hour. Steam users began reporting that the service went down around 2:00 PM ET. While access returned briefly by about 2:30 PM, the issue was not resolved. This left many users unable to connect to the digital game store.By shortly after midnight EST, complaints on Downdetector had dropped significantly, from nearly 10,000 to about 2,000, suggesting that services were gradually being restored. Third-party Steam status trackers also suggested several key platform features were once again online.