Epic Games ' wildly popular battle royale shooter Fortnite went down for over five hours on Wednesday. According to a tweet from its status page , the game said it was " currently unavailable and players are unable to connect while we investigate the issue. We will provide more information when we have a solution to bring services back online. "
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A follow-up tweet at 3:10 p.m. ET from the team said they were “continuing to work on a fix that will bring Fortnite back online and would appreciate everyone’s patience.” As of 6 p.m. ET, there was no further news, but around 6:30 p.m. ET players were reporting that the game was working again.
The Fortnite Status Twitter finally tweeted out another update to confirm that the game is live, promising that next week or next year, there will be details on “what we’re doing to help you make up for lost time.” It also noted that some people may see an additional in-game gift, but said the team is still working on it.
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During the outage, the platform appeared to display the message “You are not authorized to play Fortnite” to many players. The company began investigating the issue around 11 a.m. ET, before the servers went offline completely a few hours later.
When the servers initially went down, the Epic Games launcher wouldn't even launch Fortnite, indicating that the servers were offline, but later attempted to launch the game. Unfortunately, after launching, as many players reported, it would simply hang for about ten minutes and then appear to have failed to connect. As of 6:45 p.m. ET, the game was now launching normally.
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Around the same time the issue started, the Epic Games Store was also experiencing issues, with some players reporting they were unable to log in or even access their games offline. At least now the Epic Games desktop launcher is working and you can play other games on your computer.
