Epic apologises for Fortnite downtime

Epic Games has apologised for an extended period of downtime for its cooperative survival and battle royale title Fortnite, and has pledged to hand out in-game goodies by way of compensation.

Following what appeared at first glance to be routine maintenance, the dedicated services which control the multiplayer game Fortnite - available in two flavours, the original cooperative sandbox mode dubbed Save the World and the look-PUBG-is-popular-let's-do-that player-versus-player Battle Royale mode, marketed as two distinct games but sharing an engine and infrastructure - went down early yesterday morning. Several hours later, they were still down - and it has taken Epic nearly a full 24 hours to repair the damage, which has been blamed on database corruption.

'It’s been no secret that over the past 24 hours we’ve been experiencing issues with our services that have prevented many of you from playing Battle Royale and Save the World,' the company's Fortnite team admitted in a blog post on the matter. 'We’re sorry. We know how frustrating this has been. We messed up here. We’ll have a detailed postmortem of this week’s issues, and more information about how we will improve services for you in the future. Look for this later next week.'

In the meantime, the company has pledged to offer in-game freebies to players by way of compensation for the downtime. Those playing Battle Royale, the company has promised, will be able to go into the in-game store and pick up a Back Bling gift free of charge; anyone playing the original Save the World game variant, meanwhile, will find a Troll Stash Llama in the Loot tab. In both cases, the rewards are set to go live this weekend.

The downtime came shortly after the launch of Fortnite v3.5, which adds a replay feature to Battle Royale among other bug fixes and feature additions.