Fortnite servers went down unexpectedly on Tuesday evening, with players on PC using the Epic Games Launcher unable to log in or play. The outage was not part of the planned maintenance for the upcoming season update, catching many off guard.
Epic Games remained silent for several hours before acknowledging the issue on the @FortniteStatus Twitter account at around 10.30pm BST. The developer stated it was investigating the 'Servers Offline' error and advised players to try launching Fortnite from the desktop icon as a temporary workaround.
According to past incident logs on Epic's public status site, a similar problem was logged at 10.27pm BST on Tuesday and marked as resolved at 1.45am BST on Wednesday. A spike in reports on DownDetector coincided with the initial incident, suggesting the same issue may have recurred.
Reports of the outage subsided later in the evening, and Epic's radio silence throughout much of the disruption led to speculation that the issue was not widespread. Some PC players reported being able to launch the game without problems, while others experienced the error only on specific accounts.
The downtime was limited to the Epic Games Launcher on PC, with console and mobile players unaffected. No official explanation has been given for the outage, but services appeared to be restored for most players by early Wednesday morning.
