Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto
- An Amazon Web Services outage disrupted Wordle on Monday, causing momentary concern among players.
- The New York Times puzzle game tracks daily win streaks, adding pressure to play consistently.
- The outage highlighted users’ dependency on daily rituals and the impact of tech disruptions.
Alec Laurie was in a state of panic for several hours on Monday morning.
It wasn’t a work or family matter that had him checking his phone in between every client call. Instead, Laurie was struggling to remain calm after seeing his 292-day Wordle streak suddenly disappear.
“It was actually, genuinely stressful,” said the 43-year-old partner of a boutique executive search firm in Manchester, England.
Wordle, the hit puzzle game from The New York Times, was one of many online services that stopped working properly early Monday morning due to an Amazon Web Services outage, the media company confirmed with Business Insider. Many popular online services were also disrupted, including Snapchat, Zoom, and Reddit.
When fans like Laurie saw Wordle no longer recognized their play history, they realized they were in a jam. The game — which has millions of weekly users, according to the Times — resets every night at midnight local time and tracks players’ win streaks. Miss a day or fail to solve the puzzle by identifying a five-letter word in six tries, and the streak ends.
This meant anyone who hadn’t finished Monday’s puzzle prior to the outage had to hope the game would return before midnight, while those who had solved it could only pray their streaks would be restored.
“We are encouraging subscribers to try logging in again at a later time and are taking steps to resolve the issue as soon as possible,” Jordan Cohen, executive director of communications at The New York Times, told Business Insider.
It’s unclear how many players were affected or if all lost streaks had been restored. AWS said it mitigated the underlying issue and its services were showing strong signs of recovery, but connectivity issues remained “across multiple services in the US-EAST-1 Region.”
‘I’ve worked really hard’
One Wordle user who goes by @Morgan_Lenana on X, told Business Insider on the social media platform that she realized around 3 a.m. East Africa Time that the game wasn’t working and she might lose her streak.
“I’ve worked really hard on it and wanted to challenge myself to get to 60 days,” she wrote.
Lenana added that she felt “a little heartbroken” thinking her streak had ended, especially because she lost a streak for Connections, another daily New York Times game, two days earlier, after getting distracted by work. It would have been a “double loss” if Wordle didn’t end up coming back, she said. After checking around 2 p.m. Eastern, she said her streak had been restored.
Others, like 59-year-old Dennis Ames, who plays three New York Times games every morning to help keep his “brain active,” turned to Facebook to figure out what was happening. Ames said it wasn’t long before a user commented on his post explaining that the issue was tied to a larger outage.
“I didn’t even realize they use AWS,” Ames said.
A daily puzzle fix
Micah Willbrand of Durham, N.C., was 260 days into his Wordle streak when he woke up at around 4 am Monday and made two guesses before taking a break. When he opened his phone a few hours later to try a third time, he couldn’t log back in.
At first, Willbrand said he was only “a little worried.” Two other apps he uses frequently, Snapchat and Flight Radar, were also down. But around 8 a.m. he started getting text messages from family members showing they’d completed the puzzle game, which only made him more anxious.
Willbrand next clicked on his Wordle profile and saw he was logged in, yet his streak was still missing. “This is when I really panicked,” he said.
Around 10:30 am Eastern, Willbrand checked the game once more, and his streak had been restored. But the experience left him feeling somewhat traumatized. He said if his game history had been wiped out, he would have been upset, but that he might have also felt a strange sense of relief.
“Part of me would have been really disappointed,” he said. “But on the flip side, it would mean I was released from my self-imposed little prison.”
All four players who spoke with Business Insider said their Wordle streaks were ultimately restored. Still, the moment of panic about losing their progress revealed just how committed fans are to completing their daily puzzle fix.
“It was an interesting journey that showed me how addicted I am to Wordle,” Willbrand said.
