In October this year, Nintendo announced that it would shut down online services for the WiiU and 3DS platforms in April 2024. But recently, according to the latest blog post published by Pretendo blog, starting from the beginning of this month, new users have been unable to play any online games on WiiU and 3DS. Since this is a server-side issue, there is currently no workaround.
It is reported that currently new users will only see error code 106-0303 on WiiU and error code 006-0303 on 3DS.
On a related note, some Super Mario Maker players began encountering error code 106-0502 this month, preventing them from playing online. Pretendo believes that Nintendo "was trying to reduce the number of servers each game was running on to save costs, so there may have been an error on the load balancer as the shutdown date approached, and these shut down servers were not removed from the pool of available addresses." However, there is no sign of a fix yet.
The Wii U and 3DS eShops were shut down earlier this year. This is undoubtedly disappointing news for those players who are still using Wii U and 3DS. However, we hope that Nintendo can resolve these online gaming issues as soon as possible and give players a good gaming experience before turning off online support.
After all, games like "Super Mario Maker" and "Splatoon" basically lose most of the fun of the game without network capabilities.