The online network service for Nintendo consoles suffered from an outage in early December 2021. Players in Japan reported that they could not access online features around midnight in Japan on December 8, 2021. The outage affected not only the Nintendo Switch, but also the eShop for the Nintendo 3DS and Wii U.
Nintendo acknowledged the network outage and published updates regularly on the Japanese customer support account on Twitter. At 11:33 AM JST (December 7, 2021, at 9:33 PM ET), the company declared that a problem in the Amazon Web Services server it uses disrupted its network services. It also announced that it would take some time to see the problem resolved.
Nintendo finished fixing the network issues on its consoles around noon in Japan’s time zone. It first restored eShop access for 3DS and Wii U right before noon. The company then worked to gradually restore the Switch’s network services. It finished the job by restoring the Nintendo Switch Online services at approximately 14:12 JST (12:12 AM ET).
Network outages for game platforms can occur when too many users access the servers. One notable example for the Nintendo Switch happened on the 2020 Christmas day. Another outage occurred in January 2021, when Capcom released a demo version of Monster Hunter Rise on the eShop.
