After an unforeseen last-minute delay by Amazon Games and many adventures since then, Lost Ark’s western servers have finally been online since 12:45 a.m. (Paris time) this Saturday, February 12, 2022! Various problems persist, in particular concerning the auction house or certain overloaded servers, but overall it is possible to play Lost Ark right now.
As the original tweet from Amazon Games suggests, consider restarting Steam if it hasn’t been done since your last pre-launch login attempt. An update of about 3GB will be waiting for you once the client is restarted. It is after doing this that you will finally be able to access Lost Ark for free!