Here’s what happened.
Why was Fortnite down on December 29?
This isn’t the first time that Fortnite has become unavailable. Epic has cleverly used planned downtimes to transition the game from one chapter to another. Unfortunately, this time around, Fortnite was without any clear explanation as to why. The game’s official status page, Fortnite Status, later provided some insight. After claiming that the team was already investigating the issue, the account uploaded a follow-up tweet at 3:10 PM ET. However, it wasn’t until more than three hours later at 6:30 PM ET that Fortnite players started reporting that the game was back up already. The said Twitter account eventually confirmed this while promising players some form of compensation by next week.
We appreciate everyone’s understanding as we worked to resolve these issues and we’ll have more details next week on what we’re doing to help you make up for lost time. pic.twitter.com/ruLmG4xHgk — Fortnite Status (@FortniteStatus) December 29, 2021 Before the downtime, several players reported claiming to receive a message saying, “You do not have permission to play Fortnite.” At the same time, the Epic Games Launcher was having issues as well. This suggests that the problem wasn’t isolated to Fortnite. In total, Fortnite was out for a little over 7 hours, which is relatively rare for Epic’s flagship title. What’s even more unusual is that Epic didn’t have an explanation. Luckily, Epic did promise to compensate players for their “lost time”, so Fortnite fans do at least get something out of it. For now, Epic appears to have resolved the game’s downtime issue. In other Fortnite news, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson made his official appearance in Fortnite as The Foundation earlier this month. Meanwhile, Fortnite is now the first game to use Unreal Engine 5. Also, if you have Epic Games Store installed, you might want to check in every day for a free game courtesy of Epic Games.
