Fortnite Servers Back Up After Extended Downtime

Update 3: It looks as if everything is back to normal. Players have reported being able to get online and play on all platforms, and Epic itself announced on Twitter, "The Battle Bus once again operational! Hop in and hop on." We'll report back with any further changes.

Update 2: After identifying the cause of Fortnite's problem, Epic is bringing to bring the game back online. At 9:55 AM PT / 12:55 PM ET / 5:55 PM BST, the studio tweeted, "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." A subsequent tweet says it's seeing "improvements across all platforms." The original story follows.

Fortnite servers are down right now, preventing players from getting online with the game on PC, PS4, Xbox One, and PC. In other words, if you can't log in or are running into a queue, it's not a problem on your end. Developer Epic Games initially took the servers offline at night on April 11, and they remain offline today, April 12, at the time of this writing, according to Epic's status page. [Update 1: The latest word from Epic is that it believes it's identified the cause of the problem, though there's still no indication of when everyone will be able to get online.]

Unfortunately, there's no word on when service will be restored. Epic apologized for the matter on Twitter but has yet to offer any sense for when you'll be able to get back online. The developer is currently at work on upgrading its database, and a post on Fortnite: Battle Royale's subreddit expands on exactly what went wrong.

"We had a critical failure to one of the databases supporting our account service, and as a result our login and matchmaking systems were blocked," Epic explained. "We limited account traffic and rolled out changes to address timed-out requests to account service nodes, but these initial fixes were less resilient than we had hoped. We're working on more comprehensive upgrades to fully stabilize the system, but will need to go into emergency maintenance to apply them."

It's since provided another update that doesn't sound much more positive: "We're sorry for the ongoing extended instability. We had a critical failure with one of our account service databases. As a result, our login and matchmaking systems are unstable. Our team has been working through the night on fixes in order to bring the game fully back up. Right now we don't know how long it will take, but we will update you hourly."

It has been a rough day for Fortnite. Before bringing down the servers completely, Epic acknowledged Fortnite was facing issues that prevented some from logging in. It also had to disable the Guided Missile weapon due to a new animation bug; we don't yet know when that will return to the game, either.

The server downtime comes at a very unfortunate time for Fortnite, as the game's big 3.5 update was just released. Among other things, it added a new, potentially game-changing item in the form of the Port-a-Fort, which creates a fort for protection in a matter of seconds. You can see the full patch notes here.