Fortnite Downtime Announced Ahead of New Update Release
Fortnite is set to go offline on the morning of March 19.
Epic Games has announced when the next downtime period for Fortnite will take place as update v29.01 is pushed live. Within the coming day, the first post-launch patch for Chapter 5 Season 2 of Fortnite is set to go live and will bring with it a ton of new content and improvements. Before this patch can take effect, though, Epic will briefly have to make Fortnite inaccessible for a period of time that currently isn't known.
Shared on social media, Epic informed Fortnite players that the battle royale game will be made unplayable beginning at 4:00am ET/1:00am PT on March 19. At this time, Fortnite's main menu will be inaccessible, making all other modes (LEGO Fortnite, Rocket Racing, Fortnite Festival, etc.) outside of simple Battle Royale and Zero Build unplayable. Additionally, Epic says that matchmaking for new games will go down a bit in advance of this downtime period.
Downtime for v29.01 starts at 4:00 AM ET with matchmaking disabled a few minutes prior. pic.twitter.com/Mqui8H8HBX
— Fortnite Status (@FortniteStatus) March 18, 2024
The scary thing about Fortnite entering another downtime state is that the last time this happened, it ended up being quite a lengthy delay. With the launch of Chapter 5 Season 2, Epic pushed out the game's major update, where downtime was only expected to last for a couple of hours. However, a major issue with the patch for Chapter 5 Season 2 was discovered which led to the release of the new season being delayed by roughly half a day.
Fortunately, the same thing almost certainly won't end up happening to Fortnite with this v29.01 patch. Updates of this nature are far smaller than new seasonal patches and don't require the same sort of heavy lifting on Epic's end. As a result, there's a good chance that update v29.01 will only result in Fortnite going down for a period of a couple of hours at an absolute maximum.
Are you planning to hop into Fortnite tomorrow once this new update is released? And how are you feeling about Chapter 5 Season 2 overall at this point? Be sure to let me know either down in the comments or reach out to me on social media at @MooreMan12.