Amazon Web Services are finally live in South Africa! Well sort of, but while Amazon gets the fine-tuning and tinkering done until a wider rollout of those cloud services can be properly launched, one thing is for certain: People want local Fortnite servers. The biggest game on the planet has its fair share of local players, who are drawn in by Fortnite’s addictive gameplay and its main selling point being that it’s completely free.

The local Facebook group is demanding that the AWS servers provide local Fortnite support and the hashtag #FortniteAfricanServers is trending on Twitter. Whereas giving most games a local server option is primarily awful due to said games becoming a ghost town of lengthy lobby waits about a week after launch, Fortnite local servers could work in theory if the audience remains massive on our side of the globe.

Here’s the problem: AWS can’t currently provide that option.

The biggest problem hampering this drive for local servers is that the Amazon AWS implementation has no Elastic Kubernetes Service support yet – and it seems that’s required for Fortnite’s servers.

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Long story short, even if Amazon wanted to, they can’t yet provide those local servers that Fortnite players desperately want. And they likely won’t do so either, for a long long time.

Last Updated: April 22, 2020