Wii Shop Channel
Image: Damien McFerran / Nintendo Life

Update [Sat 21st May, 2022 18:05 BST]: Two months after the Wii and DSi Shop channel outages, YouTube channel GameXplain has now reached out to Nintendo to see if it could provide any more clarification about what's going on. Unfortunately, the new statement is that it's still got "nothing to announce" about the current status of these outages. You can see Nintendo's original response below.


Original article [Wed 23rd Mar, 2022 01:05 GMT]: Last week, word quickly spread online that Nintendo's Wii and DSi Shop Channels had been offline since at least 16th March. Naturally, it sparked fears that this could potentially be the end of these digital stores, although Nintendo hadn't communicated this.

Fortunately, it appears there may not be anything to worry about - with the company now providing an official statement (via Kotaku). According to a representative, it's currently undergoing maintenance and an update will be provided in the near future.

“The Wii Shop Channel and Nintendo DSi Shop are currently undergoing maintenance. We will provide an update at a later date.”

As previously noted, although Nintendo stopped game sales on the Wii Shop and DSi Shop Channels some time ago, users of these platforms have still able to access the digital stores to re-download existing game purchases.

Some users have also reportedly been able to bypass the error codes - 290502 and 209601 - with third-party tools like NUSDownloader and access Nintendo's main server for these systems. Eurogamer further notes how it appears to be "just the frontend sites themselves that have been taken offline".

If we hear any other updates, we'll let you know.

[source eurogamer.net, via kotaku.com, gonintendo.com]