‘Fortnite’ Down? Servers Struggling As Quarantines Continue

Fortnite

Credit: Epic Games

It’s the story of the week. Video game servers have been having sporadic problems as millions of people around the world hunker down for an extended period of quarantine or lockdown, and many are turning to games to fill the time. We’ve seen issues with services like Xbox Live, Nintendo and Discord, and now it appears it’s time for Fortnite. Epic is reporting that people are having trouble with more or less everything related to connectivity:

We know that Epic Games can handle gigantic numbers of players, and that the game is pretty far off from its colossal peak. We saw a couple of problems when the game went through rapid growth back in 2018, but it’s possible that a large traffic spike could still cause problems. Hopefully Epic gets this under control soon, because we need this thing.

Social media is currently full of reports confirming that we’re having trouble playing this thing: a quick search of “Fortnite Down” reveals a ton of results in the last few minutes.

I expect Fortnite traffic to explode in the coming days for a few reasons. For one thing, there are a huge number of “latent” players out there: people that used to play and stopped for whatever reason, either moving on to different games or not. Secondly, Fortnite is particularly good at the kind of low-level social interaction people need so badly right now. Battle Royale has a ton of down time in between encounters, and it’s a good way to just sort of hang out with your friends. Finally, Fortnite was always most popular with kids, and kids are the ones that are finding themselves with the largest glut of extra time now that schools are closed in many places.

We’ll keep an eye on it, and hopefully things will stabilize soon. Like I said, Epic has most definitely handled traffic spikes before.

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