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Some of you may have noticed that Super Mario Maker on Nintendo Network has been throwing 106-0502 quite a lot lately. The earliest instances we have found are December 8th. The reason for this is seems to be a configuration issue on Nintendo's side.

A brief overview of how these servers work. Each game consists of 2 types of servers. A single authentication server, and many "secure" (game) servers. ALL games on Nintendo Network share 2 authentication servers, but there are MANY secure servers per game. Once the client passes the authentication server, it is given the address of the secure server. This seems to be selected from a pool of many IPs, but each game only seems to have 2 ports per secure server. This is likely some form of load balancing.

The error comes from the fact that many, if not MOST, of the servers that Super Mario Maker tries to use are seemingly no longer online. We believe this is due to Nintendo trying to scale things back for the shutdown and made an error in their presumed load balancer. So far we have only been able to identify a SINGLE working IP and port combination. All others fail to connect. We are unsure at this time if this affects other games.

The earliest occurrences of the error we can find are December 8th, and it still persists as of today December 17th. We find it unlikely that Nintendo will fix this issue before the shutdown, unfortunately.