CARY – Epic Games’ free online game Fortnite has quickly developed into one of the world’s most popular titles, but the post-apocalyptic zombie game went through a technical apocalypse of its one on Wednesday and Thursday.
Epic said it was forced to take down Fortnite due to a “critical failure” with a database involving account management on Wednesday night.
The game stayed offline until shortly after 3 p.m. on Thursday.
As a result of the outage and a delay in launching of a new feature, Epic is offering players free gits as compensation.
“To make up for the delay, Epic is giving Battle Royale players a free Back Bling gift this weekend and a pack of Battle Stars next week; Those who still load up the game’s original Save The World mode get a Troll Stash Llama and seasonal gold. Unfortunately, the account service issues have pushed the Fortnite team to delay the debut of the new 50v50 v2 Limited Time mode until sometime next week,” reports Engadget.
Overnight during the outage, Epic sent a series of tweets asking for understanding.
“Heya folks,” Epic tweeted.
“We’re sorry for the ongoing extended instability. We had a critical failure with one of our account service databases. As a result, our login and matchmaking systems are unstable. Our team has been working through the night on fixes in order to bring the game fully back up. Right now we don’t know how long it will take, but we will update you hourly.
“Thanks for your patience while we work to resolve these issues.”
The downtime is bad news for the game, which has quickly developed into a worldwide phenomenon. How popular?
“For starters, it’s been raking in the cash, surpassing its predecessor, Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds (about which more in a moment), and earning more than $100 million per month in in-app purchases,” Vox reports.
“Remember, this is a game that’s freeto download and play, so that’s pretty epic. In February, it hit a record of 3.4 million people playing the game all at once, while its overall player base has reportedly passed 45 million.”
‘Emergency maintenance’
Just before 1 p.m. today, Epic tweeted:
“Services should begin to recover over the next couple of hours. 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.”
Earlier, Epic said the company was “bringing the servers offline for emergency maintenance. We apologize for this inconvenience. We currently have no ETA on when servers will be back up.”
Epic has touted Fortnite, which is playable across multiple platforms and is geared for mobile use, as the future of video gaming.
However, the technical issue is not the first Epic has suffered as the game has grown to land millions of players. It’s also generating substantial revenue for Epic due to accessory purchases by players.
Epic shut down another game, Paragon, in order to focus more resources on Fortnite as it became increasingly popular.
