Fortnite Battle Royale Servers Offline For Emergency Maintenance
Early this morning, Epic Games took Fortnite Battle Royale offline to push through the game’s new v3.5 patch. Since that update, Fortnite players have been experiencing a number of technical issues surrounding login into the game. At about 5:00 EST, things got really bad and many players found themselves unable to login or use Epic services. Due to the severity of the problem, Epic has taken Fortnite Battle Royale servers offline for emergency maintenance.
Update (17:47 UTC) – “We are starting to see improvements across all platforms. More updates in an hour! ”
Identified (16:52 UTC) – “Services should begin to recover over the next couple of hours. Due to issues with our account system, players on PS4 will be unable to login for an additional period of time. We’re sorry for the extended downtime. We’ll update you in an hour. ”
Investigating (15:46 UTC) – “We’ve made progress on our internal investigations and believe we may understand the problem!”
Update (06:10 UTC) – From the Epic status page: “We’re still working on the database upgrade process, and remain in downtime.”
When you attempt to login to Fortnite, you will be greeted by a Servers: Offline status. The timeline for when Epic will get the game back online is currently unknown.
Announcement of the drastic measure came on the official Fortnite Twitter account:
We’re bringing the servers offline for emergency maintenance. We apologize for this inconvenience. We currently have no ETA on when servers will be back up.
Fortnite have revealed that the issue stems from a database problem and they briefly appeared to have a fix in place, but that was short lived. Given the fact that Fortnite doesn’t have an ETA for when servers will come back online, it is pretty safe to assume that the problem is more serious then they devs have seen before.
As Fortnite is one of the biggest games in the world currently, it is safe to say that this downtime is costing Epic a pretty penny in revenue. Recent reports pegged daily revenue of just the iOS version to be $1.8 million. With so many dollars at stake, I expect Epic to be in a current “all hands on deck” type state.
When Fortnite Battle Royale does comeback online, expect the servers to get slammed. Queues (when the issue was “fixed” earlier) had players waiting for up to 1+ hours to get back into the game (if you even could at all). Until then, watch this clip of Twitch streamer Ninja being taken offline at the worst possible moment.
If you want to stay up to date on Fortnite’s status, check out Epic’s status page. You can also keep it locked on the official twitter account of Fortnite for updates as well.
Fortnite Battle Royale is currently available on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC, and iOS devices (with Android coming soon).
More: Fortnite Battle Royale Beginner’s Guide
More: Fortnite Battle Royale news
