Fortnite Servers Are Down [UPDATE]

Update: Epic Games has announced that all of the issues outlined below have been solved, however, there could still be some lingering issues as servers get fully back up.

Original: Fortnite’s servers are down, presumably due to the influx of players as a result of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, which has people all around the globe hunkered at home with nothing to do. According to the game’s ofificial Twitter account, the team is current aware of the issues with logins, matchmaking, the Item Shop, and other services, and it will provide an update once these issues are resolved. At the moment of publishing, an update still hasn’t arrived.

“We’re currently investigating issues with logins, matchmaking, the Item Shop, and other Fortnite services,” writes the games official Twitter account. “We’ll provide an update when these are resolved.

The game’s support account also notes that if you’re missing “Friends” in your “Friends List,” they will return and populate the list once these issues have been resolved. In other words, they haven’t been permanently wiped.

Epic Games hasn’t revealed what’s exactly the problem, but the issue is most likely server stress. In other words, too many players are trying to login and play at once, which is causing server issues. And this is likely due to the fact that the coronavirus pandemic has many people home, which in turns means more people playing video games than normal. In addition to Fortnite, many other games and services have run into similar server issues as the Internet tries to adjust to the surge in traffic.

There’s currently no word when the server issues will be remedied. That said, Epic Games is usually quite quick about solving these type of problems. However, servers have gone down in the past for prolonged periods of time.