Epic Games has confirmed that their Fortnite servers are back up and operational following several issues regarding matchmaking and a few other isolated hiccups. The down period for the series started in the early hours of the morning and have officially wrapped up, with green showing up across the board for the game’s status. In true Epic fashion though, the developer team did give a detailed explanation of what went down.
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The team wanted to explain why the need for so many emergency fixes. As they themselves mentioned, this was the third day in a row for emergency maintenance. According to Epic, “We mentioned back in February scaling the backend MongoDB database that we use for much of our account and matchmaking system has been a challenge. We’ve made a ton of progress and our database has never been in a better place than it is right now, but we knew that it wasn’t the right fit to handle our continued growth and new types of LTMs. The Playground LTM v1, for example, has a maximum of 4 players per game which means we’ll need a lot more game instances and matchmaking sessions to support that mode than we do a mode like Battle Royale that can support up to 100 players per instance.”
When working on overhauling a game, remember – Fortnite is still in beta, unforeseen issues can arise, “Over the last couple of days we’ve been working on rolling out a brand new, horizontally scalable, session tracking service to manage sessions for matchmaking. Despite extensive testing over the last few weeks, we ran into some problems when we attempted to put it into production.”
They then added, “First, we ran into an issue with the way the system handled the case of many thousands of empty game servers, just waiting for people to drop at Tilted, that caused a lot more data to be returned by queries to the service than we expected. We solved that problem and tried to deploy again this morning, and while performance looked good we ran into a problem with the way our dedicated server auto-scaling systems interacted with the session tracker that required us to revert to the previous system again.”
It looks like all of the aforementioned issues have been handled and matchmaking is back up online for all platforms. Happy gaming!
