Fortnite Back Online After Unexplained Outage from Yesterday Morning

Fortnite is in its prime right now with the holiday season and the majority of its player base enjoying time off from school and work, along with the start of Chapter 3 with a new map. This would be the worst time for the game servers to go down. And that’s precisely what happened on Wednesday morning.

The reason for the outage was Epic Games themselves taking Fortnite offline to investigate some issues with logging in and matchmaking. Very little information was shared regarding the investigation, and Epic put out a message via the official Fortnite support account on Twitter to confirm that Fortnite indeed was offline.

Epic didn’t state the exact reason for the server downtime; the original tweet was part of a chain that added some more context. Epic had confirmed that it was investigating “login, matchmaking, and other issues” that were present in Fortnite. Not much more was elaborated beyond this, but Fortnite has had a history of dealing with this kind of issue for some time now.

There were also reports on Wednesday morning that Epic was having issues with login and loading. The store was online, but players reported it felt sluggish and delayed. Technical problems from Fortnite working their way into other Epic products may mean this issue was more extensive than just a wayward game patch. 

It could result from a larger server problem, like the Amazon Web Services downtime in early December.

Since then, Epic Games has confirmed via the official Fortnite Status Twitter account that the servers are back online, and the Winterfest event will continue as planned. No more information was shared on the matchmaking and login issues, but they appear to have been resolved.

Outages like these are not unheard of for live service games but can be a major hassle when it happens during times of high traffic. While players will come back to the game regardless, Fortnite took a blow in reliability and also missed out on potential microtransactions people were hoping to perform. But at least the servers are online, and fans can enjoy the battle royale once more.

About Fortnite

Fortnite is an online video game developed by Epic Games and released in 2017. It is available in three distinct game mode versions that otherwise share the same general gameplay and game engine: Fortnite Battle Royale, a free-to-play battle royale game in which up to 100 players fight to be the last person standing;

Fortnite: Save the World, a cooperative hybrid tower defense-shooter and survival game in which up to four players fight off zombie-like creatures and defend objects with traps and fortifications they can build; and Fortnite Creative, in which players are given complete freedom to create worlds and battle arenas.