Fortnite Hits 3.4 Million Concurrent Users On Same Weekend Of Server Outages

Fortnite, the stylized shooter from Gears of War creator Epic Games, has reached a new player milestone. Over the weekend, on Super Bowl Sunday, the game hit a new record of 3.4 million concurrent players, Epic announced in a blog post this week.

By comparison, that's ahead of the 3 million peak concurrent players that PUBG reached in January. The big difference, however, is that Fortnite's concurrent figure almost certainly covers all platforms--PS4, Xbox One, and PC--while PUBG's was for PC alone.

Still, 3.4 million concurrent users is a huge number and it speaks to the ongoing popularity of Epic's game. The developer did not provide a breakdown of how that figure is divided between the paid Fortnite base game and the free-to-play Battle Royale mode, but it can be safely assumed that Battle Royale has the bulk of the players.

Fortnite's newest player milestone is all the more notable when you consider that the game ran into some serious and significant issues recently. In a frank blog post, Epic talked about how the "extreme" server load led to six different incidents on Saturday and Sunday, which in some instances included "total service disruptions" for the game.

Epic's blog post offers a postmortem on the server issues that cropped up alongside the new player record. It goes deep into detail on the systems that power the game and what went wrong, along with a rundown of the steps Epic is taking to ensure server stability in the future. You can read that blog post here.

"Problems that affect service availability are our primary focus above all else right now," Epic said. "We want you all to know we take these outages very seriously, conducting in-depth post-mortems on each incident to identify the root cause and decide on the best plan of action. The online team has been working diligently over the past month to keep up with the demand created by the rapid week-over-week growth of our user base.

"While we cannot promise there won't be future outages as our services reach new peaks, we hope to live by this great quote from Futurama, 'When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."

Epic sometimes brings down Fortnite's servers intentionally, as it did this week in advance of the game's next big update, which is out now. Update 2.4.2's biggest feature is a new weapon, the Crossbow. This was teased as a silent weapon recently in-game, and it's not only stealthy, but it also has another perk: It fires arrows, which are a new type of ammo that are unlimited in supply. Crossbows can be found as ground loot or in chests, with Rare and Epic versions also available. You can see a Valentine's-themed version of the weapon, as well as upcoming Valentine's skins, our gallery of images here.