Fortnite is back online after Epic fail — and the freebies are flowing

UPDATE: Following a lengthy outage, Epic Games has announced Fortnite is up and running once again, while apologising for the issues experienced over the last 24 hours.

Furthermore, the developer is dishing out freebies to atone for the inconvenience.

The firm says it is currently conducting a post mortem into the database issues and will provide updates on how it intends to improve services.

The full statement is below:

It’s been no secret that over the past 24 hours we’ve been experiencing issues with our services that have prevented many of you from playing Battle Royale and Save the World. We’re sorry. We know how frustrating this has been.

We messed up here. As thanks for being awesome and patient, we’re doing the following:

• For Battle Royale players, this weekend we’ll be offering a Back Bling gift that you can pick up in the store for free.
• For our Save the World folks, this weekend we will be offering a Troll Stash Llama in the loot tab for free.

Next week, we will be granting a pack of Battle Stars to our Battle Royale players and Seasonal Gold to the Save the World players. This will require brief additional downtime, so we will be including it as a part of our planned update next week.

We’ll have a detailed postmortem of this week’s issues, and more information about how we will improve services for you in the future. Look for this later next week.

Original story continues below…

Players trying to log in to Fortnite are discovering that the popular to play mulitplayer shooter appears to be down. 

The outage has been acknowledged by Epic Games, the game’s developer, but it said that it currently didn’t have a timeframe for when the game would be back up.

The most recent update from official channels came this morning at 7:10am BST and said, “We’re still working on the database upgrade process, and remain in downtime.”

A previous message gave more details as to what is going wrong with the game’s servers. Apparently the outage has been caused by a “database failure”, which has been preventing logins across all of Epic’s services including its games, its websites, and its launcher.

Matchmaking has been disabled in an attempt to resolve the issue.

Although the development team have seen some success in resolving the issue, people rushing to log back into the game downed the servers once more.

The perils of popularity

Fortnite is one of the most popular games on the planet right now. At the start of February, Epic Games announced that the game had a massive 3.4 million concurrent players, and this number is likely to have increased in the months since as the game has been released on iOS. An Android release is expected “in the next few months”.

Fortnite joins a growing number of so-called ‘battle royale’ style multiplayer games that have proved to be amongst the most popular online shooters of 2017 and 2018. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds was the first breakout hit of the genre, and more recently Cliff Bleszinski’s studio Boss Key has gotten in on the action with its early access game Radical Heights.

PUBG may have had a head start over Fortnite’s battle royale mode, but with the latter game being free to play it has attracted a fast-growing fanbase.

Have you been affected by the outage? Let us know @TrustedReviews