‘Fortnite’ Downtime: How Long Does It Take for Servers to Come Back Up?
Itching to play some 'Fortnite'? Here's what you need to know.
About once a week, Fortnite goes down so developer Epic Games can load in the latest updates, adding new features, Battle Pass challenges, special cosmetics and more. But how long do these downtimes last before the servers come back up? Here’s what you need to know if you’re itching to get a game of Fortnite: Battle Royale in but keep getting an error message.
Fortnite updates typically last for about 1-3 hours, depending on how much content is included. During that window of time you won’t be able to access Epic Games’ servers, though thankfully most people are probably sound asleep when this happens.
These updates usually arrive at 4 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday morning, though until pretty recently this happened on Thursday morning instead. During the week of June 25, 2018, Epic actually pushed the weekly update back a day to Wednesday morning so it could unleash one of its biggest updates yet, adding a new Playground mode that gives you and three other friends an entire island to mess around with, shoot at each other with instant respawns, and practice your building skills in peace.
Unfortunately, not long after Epic added Playground mode to the game, the entire system went offline again. This isn’t planned downtime, so it’s unclear exactly how long it will last. The trouble this morning, and at about 7:49 a.m. Eastern when Epic confirmed that an issue with matchmaking had caused them to remove Playground mode just hours after its release.
Then, at roughly 10:42 a.m. Eastern, the company tweeted again that matchmaking was back, though it’s still working out some kinks with Playground mode.
So if we get similar, unexpected downtime in the future you can probably expect it to last for a few hours, though that could vary depending on exactly what’s causing the problem.
