Earlier today, it was reported that online services for Nintendo Online were experiencing an outage, thus prohibiting players from taking full advantage of some games. After the initial reports were made, Nintendo Japan has offered additional information regarding the outage, and based on the company’s statement, users will have to wait indefinitely.
Going into more detail about the outage itself, it seems that the situation is more serious than initially thought. According to a tweet that was made by the official Nintendo Japan account, the company has issued an apology for any inconveniences the outage may have caused, as well as stated that there is “no prospect of recovery” for now. As such, users will have to dig in and be patient, and/or engage with games that don’t rely on online components.
Server outages happen somewhat frequently, but there are many reasons as to why the outages happen in the first place. Whether the servers become a target of a hack attack, overloaded, a glitch in the system, or anything else, customers and users of the servers become unable to fully use them. As a result of that, due to the severity of the outage, a fix may take up to multiple days (or even a week) to implement.
Nintendo Online isn’t the only online service to be affected by an outage. Earlier in the week, Microsoft’s Xbox Live online service also suffered an outage, stopping users and subscribers from using the service for some of their games and such. One interesting thing to note about the two outage cases is how they may very well deal with the current Coronavirus situation.
Since millions of people are currently sitting at home, their situation gives them the opportunity to use their consoles and the online services to play games, use applications, and so on. As a result, the significant influx of users at the same time is putting too much pressure on the servers, thus creating an outage. Nonetheless, a fix will definitely be implemented down the road and smooth things out.
Source: Nintendo Soup, Twitter
