The crisis has ended: ‘Fortnite’ servers are back online

By Lulu Chang Updated November 9, 2018

fortnite mobile beginners guide building — Image used with permission by copyright holder

If you’re trying to play Fortnite and finding that you can do no such thing, you’re not alone. The Fortnite servers have been down since the evening of Wednesday, April 11, and as of now, they remain offline. This means that players cannot get online regardless of whether they’re using a PC, PS4, or Xbox One.

There is no sense quite yet as to when we can expect the game to return to its online status. Initially, the game’s developer, Epic Games, noted that it was “experiencing issues with our account services that may cause login issues.” A few hours later, we learned that login was blocked across all Epic endpoints, including games, websites, and the Epic Games Launcher, as a result of a database failure.

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While recovery seemed to be imminent in the early morning hours, Epic Games later found that the “initial fix was unable to handle returning traffic,” and that players were again experiencing login issues. So as of now, the team is still working on the database upgrade process and remains in downtime.

“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.”

A more recent update doesn’t do much to assuage concerns. “We’re sorry for the ongoing extended instability. We had a critical failure with one of our account service databases,” the team wrote. “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.”

While there’s never a particularly good time for a game to go down, this timing was particularly bad for Fortnite. The game just released its version 3.5 update, which included the new Port-a-Fort item to create a protective fort in just seconds.

Updated on April 12: Following almost 24 hours of server issues, Fortnite is back online on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.

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