ARC Raiders and Other Online Services Face Outages on Christmas Eve Amid AWS Speculation

Many online services and games, including ARC Raiders, are reportedly experiencing outages on Christmas Eve. According to Downdetector, a platform that tracks service status, around 21,000 users in the U.S. reported issues with the third-person PvPvE shooter ARC Raiders at the time of writing.

Players have mostly encountered the ART00004 Network Timeout error on platforms such as Xbox, PS5, and PC. Downdetector first recorded outages at 8:00 PM ET, with reports rising to approximately 45,000 by 8:52 PM ET, according to XDA.

Other popular games like Rocket League, Fortnite, and Fall Guys are also affected. Rocket League players reported Epic Online Services (EOS) timeout errors, while Fall Guys users faced matchmaking and login problems.

Beyond gaming, users reported issues with services like Steam, the PlayStation Network, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), which many games, including ARC Raiders, rely on for backend infrastructure. Downdetector noted AWS disruptions beginning at 8:04 PM ET. Posts on social media and coverage by The Kobeissi Letter also highlighted the outage.

However, Amazon Web Services responded to the claims, stating, “@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.”

Despite AWS’s statement, users continue reporting difficulties on social media, suggesting ongoing problems with the cloud infrastructure affecting multiple platforms.

Both AWS and ARC Raiders have faced similar outages in the past. In October, AWS experienced a global outage affecting platforms such as Reddit, Snapchat, Venmo, and Zoom. Reuters reported that the outage originated in AWS’s Virginia cluster (us-east-1), affecting the Domain Name System and preventing applications from connecting to AWS cloud databases. AWS later explained, “When this issue occurred at 11:48 PM PDT, all systems needing to connect to the DynamoDB service in the N. Virginia (us-east-1) Region via the public endpoint immediately began experiencing DNS failures and failed to connect to DynamoDB. This included customer traffic as well as traffic from internal AWS services that rely on DynamoDB,” and apologized for the disruption.

In November, ARC Raiders also faced an outage, with over 29,000 reports of users experiencing issues, according to XDA, highlighting the game’s recurring connectivity problems.