“The servers are melting down, sorry fam.”
That blunt line from Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney summed up a frenzied few hours over Christmas Eve and into Christmas Day, when Fortnite, ARC Raiders, Rocket League, Steam, PlayStation Network and a raft of other online services experienced login failures, matchmaking errors and mysterious timeouts.
A snapshot of what happened
Players around the world saw a familiar — and infuriating — pattern: games refused to authenticate, matchmaking stalled, storefronts hiccuped. Downdetector reported big spikes in complaints for multiple services; ARC Raiders briefly showed one of the largest surges. Titles that rely on Epic Online Services (EOS) or cloud providers like Amazon Web Services were especially visible in the outage roll-call.
Epic’s official status channels and the Fortnite Updates page acknowledged the problem and warned that high traffic could boot players even from otherwise healthy sessions. Sweeney’s on-the-nose social posts tracked the mood: apologetic at first, then optimistic a few hours later when services began to return.
Who was affected — and how widely
Affected games and platforms included:
- Fortnite and other Epic ecosystem services (login failures, matchmaking errors)
- ARC Raiders (ART00004 network timeouts)
- Rocket League and Fall Guys (authentication and matchmaking problems)
- Steam (intermittent storefront and connectivity issues)
- PlayStation Network (partial outages affecting crossplay and sign-ins)
- Smaller titles that piggyback on EOS or AWS — for example, Ready Or Not displayed "Unable to Authenticate" messages because it uses Epic's auth services
- Check the official status pages for the platform you’re trying to use — Epic and Sony status portals are the most accurate sources.
- Avoid repeatedly hammering login attempts; that can flag accounts and complicate recovery.
- Try single-player or offline modes where available. For example, Ready Or Not’s single-player still worked while its online auth was down.
- If you use a portable device like a Steam Deck, watch for service-specific fixes and updates — Valve’s recent client improvements have made recovery smoother for some users. Steam Deck download power-saver update
- Be patient. Historically, many widespread authentication outages resolve in one to a few hours once engineers roll fixes out.
If a game used Epic’s systems or components hosted on major cloud providers, it was at greater risk of disruption.
ARC Raiders players in particular felt the pain; the launch title’s spike in reports underlined how fragile large-scale, multiplayer backends can be when traffic surges. (For background on the game itself, see the Arc Raiders coverage.) ARC Raiders launch and technical features
Blame, denials and the murky middle
Within hours, fingers were pointed at Amazon Web Services on social media and forums. AWS pushed back, telling users its services were operating normally and urging people to consult the official AWS Health Dashboard rather than speculation.
Past incidents — notably an October outage that stemmed from DNS issues and a load-balancer monitoring subsystem — make it easy to assume a single cloud provider failure. But this episode showed how outages often look systemic even when they originate from a smaller, hard-to-see corner of the internet: overloaded auth endpoints, cascading timeouts between services, or routing problems farther upstream.
Engineers at Epic, Sony and other affected companies raced to isolate and patch the faults. By late on December 25 there were signs of recovery: matchmaking returned for many players, storefront issues eased, and officials thanked the teams who worked through the holiday.
What players can do right now
If you were booted, here are practical steps that helped other players during the outage:
If you’re thinking of buying new hardware as a backup for couch gaming, the PlayStation 5 Pro is still a popular choice among players who want a more powerful local box alongside online play — the console remains available on retail channels. PlayStation 5 Pro
A reminder about modern infrastructure
This wasn’t the first holiday blackout the industry has seen, and it likely won’t be the last. Games today stitch together identity, matchmaking, anti-cheat, analytics and store components from different vendors. When one piece struggles, the rest can wobble.
Still, the tone after this outage was less accusation and more relief: engineers had pushed fixes, players returned to matches, and a few very online friends traded memes about Santa’s data center getting overloaded. If anything, the episode underlines how much the modern gaming ecosystem depends on invisible teams keeping the lights on.
Sony and Epic’s post-outage updates suggested the immediate crisis had passed; expect deeper postmortems from the companies involved once the holidays settle. In the meantime, if you want to stream PS5 games or manage cloud play from the living room, there are new PlayStation cloud features worth checking out that make remote play more convenient when networks behave. PlayStation Portal streaming update
If further details surface — for example, an official root-cause statement from Epic or a broader network vendor admission — expect follow-ups. For now: reboot your router, try a single-player run, and maybe let the engineers enjoy a belated mince pie.