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New: 'Fortnite' Servers Could Be Down Much, Much Longer Than We Thought

This article is more than 4 years old.

credit: Epic Games

Update: Chapter 2 is confirmed to start on October 15 in China. It may or may not start at the same time for everyone else. It's now looking like the game will be back up this evening.

If you've logged into Fortnite in the past day, you haven't really logged into Fortnite. The game servers are currently "down", but not in the normal sense. We had the usual end-of-season live event yesterday, but instead of dropping us back into gameplay, the game sucked us into a black hole at the center of the map where we apparently remain, and now that's all the game is. You can't start matches, you can't play the game, you can't do anything but stare at a black hole. And that leaves everyone wondering when servers are going to come back up again.

At the moment, we have very little to go off of. The one possibly salient piece of information that might hint at when this whole thing will end is a piece of datamined code from the Fortnite website that originally read that "The End" event would end on Tuesday at 6:00 AM. That has since been updated to Thursday at 4:00 AM, which is when downtime typically begins for a normal patch:

As Lucas notes, this does not mean that we're not going to play again until then, and it's not a hard and fast indication of anything. But it is sort of the only information we have to go on: the status page still just reads "anomaly detected", Epic's social media channels are blank, and the game, of course, is still just a black hole.

It's also possible that this date change was a troll: we can assume that Epic employees follow dataminer accounts, and it's not out of the question that someone would have changed this line of code to throw people off. This is Fortnite, so anything is most definitely possible. It's also possible that any extended downtime is a kind of narrative cover for massive backend work on Epic's part.

We'll see: the hype rolling in after the event turned to boredom sometime last evening, and Thursday is a very long time from now. Epic has gigantic momentum right now, but it risks leaving that energy to fizzle if it takes too long. If the game needs to be down this long for technical reasons, that's a loss that Epic will just have to take. But hopefully that isn't the case, and things will come up either tomorrow, like the code initially stated, or even sooner than that. More people are talking about this game than have been for a very long time, and I'd hate to lose this hype window.