Users of several blockchain gaming services had difficulties accessing their games due to an outage at Amazon Web Services. In a release seen on June 14, Illuvium announced to its users that the difficulties being encountered on their platform were on account of the outage that AWS was experiencing. According to the statement from the blockchain gaming platform, the issue is not peculiar to Illuvium, as other web-based services based on AWS were also having issues.
Widespread outage at AWS
In a release to that effect, the Illuvium team stated,
“Due to Amazon Web Services (AWS) @awscloud experiencing a widespread outage, a multitude of digital services globally—ours included—are being affected. This isn’t an Illuvium-specific issue, but it may impact your experience on our platforms.”
In addition, the users of the platform were made aware that there is nothing the Illuvium team can do about the outage at the moment. They said they were keeping an eye on the situation.
Centralized infrastructure for blockchain gaming
While several users complained that they were unable to log in to their gaming dashboards on the platform, others wondered why blockchain gaming should use centralized services to run its platforms. A user of the Illuvium gaming service, @updownupupright, wrote,
“When your games are released, please make them playable offline some way, because stuff like this makes it very hard to play when you’re waiting for a server or internet outage to play a game. If I own the game, I want to play the game on my time, not waiting around on an outage.”
Subsystem responsible for capacity management
In a reaction to the complaints of users, AWS Health Status said that the increased error rate and latencies experienced by users have been resolved. The update from AWS stated that the issue arose from a subsystem responsible for capacity management. They acknowledged that users were unable to contact the service at that point due to the same error issues.
The health status from AWS said,
June 13, 3:42 PM PDT Between 11:49 AM PDT and 3:37 PM PDT, we experienced increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region. Our engineering teams were immediately engaged and began investigating. We quickly narrowed down the root cause to an issue with a subsystem responsible for capacity management for AWS Lambda, which caused errors directly for customers (including through API Gateway) and indirectly through the use of other AWS services. Additionally, customers may have experienced authentication or sign-in errors when using the AWS Management Console or authenticating through Cognito or IAM STS. “
Outage has been resolved
The company said that the underlying issue has been fully resolved.
“At that time, we began processing the backlog of asynchronous Lambda invocations that accumulated during the event, including invocations from other AWS services. As of 3:37 PM, the backlog was fully processed. The issue has been resolved, and all AWS services are operating normally.”
Another user of Illuvium services, @LokalBitBuddY, wondered if decentralized cloud services were the solution to issues like this. Many like him believe that blockchain gaming services should be run on decentralized network infrastructure.
