Epic Games’ popular battle royale title Fortnite faced extended server downtime following the scheduled rollout of its v36.20 update, with thousands of players across the globe reporting connectivity issues.
In a post on its official Fortnite Status account on X early Monday, the company announced, “Built for battle. Driven by justice. Downtime for v36.20 begins at 4 AM ET with matchmaking ending shortly beforehand.” While the downtime was expected to be routine, it quickly became clear that players were encountering more severe issues than anticipated.
Shortly after the update began rolling out, Fortnite Status acknowledged that users were experiencing matchmaking difficulties. “We’re aware that players may be experiencing issues when trying to matchmake in Fortnite. We’re working on a fix and will update this thread once this has been resolved,” the team posted.
By Tuesday evening around 7:30 PM IST (10:00 AM ET), Epic Games confirmed that the downtime had to be extended due to an unexpected issue discovered during offline testing. “Hey everyone, we’re extending downtime while we work to resolve an issue discovered during offline checks. We’ll do our best to get Fortnite servers online ASAP. Keep an eye on this thread for any future updates,” the account stated.
The outage has sparked widespread frustration among the game’s player base. According to outage monitoring site Downdetector, more than 800 users in the United States alone had reported problems with the game by 7:51 PM IST (10:21 AM ET) on Tuesday. A significant 80 per cent of those affected cited server connection issues, while 12 per cent struggled with logging in and seven per cent faced gameplay disruptions.
As of now, Epic Games has not provided a definitive timeline for when the servers will be back online for everyone. Players have been advised to monitor the Fortnite Status account for real-time updates as the company continues working towards a resolution.
