Fortnite players to get freebies as Epic apologizes for outage (update)

Update 3 (4:47 p.m. ET): Epic will be doling out some rewards as an apology for the server outage, the developer announced. Here is the full list of freebies:

• Battle Royale players will be able to pick up a free Back Bling gift from the in-game store.
• Save the World players can get a Troll Stash Llama for free.

But that’s not all!

“Next week, we will be granting a pack of Battle Stars to our Battle Royale players and Seasonal Gold to the Save the World players,” Epic stated in the post. “This will require brief additional downtime, so we will be including it as a part of our planned update next week.”

The company also said that a full post-mortem with more details about what went wrong will be released next week.

Update 2 (4 p.m. ET): Epic Games’ status page says that all systems are now fully operational. The games’ online servers are now back up.

“Login and game service issues have been resolved and we’ve returned to a healthy state,” Epic Games wrote.

Update (1:43 p.m. ET): It looks like the servers should be fixed soon, according to Epic Games, although the developer isn’t being more specific than that.

“Services should begin to recover over the next couple of hours,” Epic Games’ status page currently states. “Due to issues with our account system, players on PS4 will be unable to login for an additional period of time. We’re sorry for the extended downtime. We’ll update you in an hour.”

The original story about the server downtime is below.

Original story: The servers for Fortnite are currently offline, and there’s no estimate for when they’ll be back up.

“Login is currently blocked across all Epic endpoints, including games, websites, and the Epic Games Launcher,” Epic Games said last night. “This is due to a database failure which we are working to resolve as quickly as possible. In a measure towards resolution, matchmaking will be blocked for a short period. Thank you for your patience!”

There was then a degradation of matchmaking to handle account service issues, and Epic later stated that the problems were getting better.

“We’ll be undergoing emergency downtime to deploy major upgrades to our database systems,” the company later announced. The database upgrade process is still ongoing at the time of this writing, and the game “remains in downtime,” as of Epic Games’ most recent status update.

We’ve reached out to Epic Games for any clarity on what exactly happened and when we can expect the game to return.

For now, the game is down for everyone, not just you, and there’s no clear timeline for when the servers will come back.