Why is Fortnite Down? Here's what You Need to Know When the Fortnite Servers Are Down

If you’ve played Fortnite: Battle Royale before, odds are you’ve run into trouble. Ranging from issues with login and matchmaking, well welcome to Fortnite. Sometimes the games servers go down for “emergency maintenance,” there is no estimate on when they can go back up.

Fortnite: Battle Royale seemed to be in good shape after a brief downtime on April 11th, 2018 for the v3.5 patch. It started having problems with login around 5:00 EST, however, effectively preventing people from playing the game or using other Epic services. Epic said that the problem was related to a database error and deployed a fix. For a moment, the developer said that the fix was working. Shortly after that, however, players began encountering more login difficulties as well as excessively long wait times when trying to launch the game. It was then that Epic announced it would be bringing the servers down for emergency maintenance in order to make ‘major upgrades’ to the database system.

We don’t know just how many people were playing Fortnite at that time, but we assume that there are a lot. Epic has made some netcode adjustments for scaling in the recent past, and an influx of players of the kind we assume is happening inevitably comes with a massive strain on both the developers and the servers. In the past, we’ve gotten some of our updates on player counts as a result of downtime, so maybe Epic will take this moment to pull the curtain back a bit by way of explaining exactly what’s going on here.

so if it ever goes down again (which it will) keep looking at the status page to see what progress Epic has made fixing the issue.