We’re used to websites and apps going down, but it’s not often that the most popular game on the planet goes offline for an extended period of time. That’s exactly what happened on Wednesday, as Fortnite went down just after 1 PM ET. According to the Epic Games status page, the game services, matchmaking, parties, friends, and more are all experiencing issues.
On that same page, Fortnite developer Epic Games refers to the issues as major outages. It is unclear what is causing all of these issues, as the developer simply says that it’s “currently investigating.” The company has yet to provide any additional information about the outage.
Here is the tweet from Epic Games about the issues, which are still ongoing as of 2:19 PM ET:
Fortnite is currently unavailable and players are unable to log-in while we investigate an issue.
We'll provide more info when we have a solution to bring services back online. pic.twitter.com/B3wXvu5SL6
— Fortnite Status (@FortniteStatus) December 29, 2021
Interestingly, Downdetector doesn’t show many significant problems beyond Fortnite at the moment. That said, the Epic Games Store has hit a rough patch as well. The company says that its digital game store is currently suffering from “Degraded Performance”.
Other than that, the first-person shooter game Escape from Tarkov is having significant issues as well. These issues appear to be ongoing, stemming from emergency maintenance that began yesterday. The game’s Twitter account hasn’t said anything about disruptions since yesterday.
If and when we learn more, we’ll update this page. In the meantime, if you are dying to get a battle royale match in this afternoon, keep a close eye on the Epic Games status page. The developer will undoubtedly provide updates in the coming hours.
UPDATE: Late on Wednesday evening, after hours of downtime, Fortnite came back online just before 7 PM ET. Epic Games tells players it will “have more details next week on what we’re doing to help you make up for lost time.”
