‘Fortnite’ down: Game suffers 'major outage' causing login and matchmaking issues

Many “Fortnite” players may have been looking forward to playing the battle royale game on their holiday break this week. Unfortunately, they were met with several server issues that prevented them from logging in, among other problems that came up on Wednesday.

Around the afternoon of Wednesday (UTC), players started seeing issues in the game. Those who were able to log in and join a match during that time reported that “Fortnite” suddenly kept crashing before the game started displaying a myriad of error messages. Later on, players reported they were unable to log in, while others also observed that the game’s matchmaking was not working properly.

The official Fortnite Status page on Twitter confirmed that login, matchmaking, and other issues were being investigated on Wednesday, Dec. 29, at around 4:00 p.m. UTC. A couple of hours later, Epic Games issued an update saying “Fortnite” was “unavailable” due to the same problems identified in the earlier post.

It appears that server issues persist several hours later. Around 8:00 p.m. UTC, Fortnite Status said the developers are working on a fix that should bring “Fortnite” back online. “Fortnite game servers are currently offline while we investigate a solution to stability issues, and we’ll provide another update as more info is available,” Epic Games added.

As of this writing, though, it appears that Epic has yet to fix the problems and there is no word yet on when “Fortnite” will be available. The status.epicgames.com website currently indicates that the “Fortnite” website and the Fortnite Crew subscription service are still operational, but other parts of the online multiplayer game, including login, social features (Parties, Friends, Messaging), voice chat, matchmaking, stats, leaderboards, and the in-game shop are all suffering from a “major outage.”

The server issues might be affecting other Epic Games services, but the issue is not as drastic as currently being experienced by “Fortnite” players. The same status website indicates at the moment that login and game services for “Rocket League” are having “degraded performances.” The same status is listed right now for Epic Games Store’s login, download/installation, purchasing/refunding, and store browsing services just as the annual Holiday Sale approaches its final week.

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash