[UPDATED] Fortnite Enters 17 Hours of Emergency Server Downtime and Lengthy Queue

UPDATE TWO: Epic have confirmed on Twitter that services should begin to resume over the next couple of hours, but PS4 players will have to hang on a little longer due to issues with the account system. 

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.

— Fortnite (@FortniteGame) April 12, 2018

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

UPDATE: Since publishing this news, the servers have started to come back online, with some players able to get in a game, while others are stuck in a 1-2 hour queue. Original story below.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Fortnite is no stranger to server downtime, with the game often struggling to keep up with the constant influx of players due to the game’s growing popularity. But these downtime periods are usually scheduled for when updates come out, and they don’t last as long as this. The new challenges for week eight were meant to be released today, but it seems like players throwing so many Port-A-Forts everywhere has caused the servers to have a meltdown.

We're experiencing issues with our account services that may cause login issues.

Stay updated on our status page while we investigate this: https://t.co/8xBpgCayKZ

— Fortnite (@FortniteGame) April 11, 2018

Yesterday, around 6pm Eastern, Fortnite players were booted from their games and greeted with a message in-game stating “User auth check failed.” The log-in servers worldwide had gone down and Fortnite players all over the globe cried out in anguish, as their victory royales and portable forts would have to wait. But it was expected to last a few hours at best. 17 hours on, the servers are still down, and players are tearing their own hair out and crying themselves to sleep. Thankfully, Epic are on the case from this Reddit post:

“We apologize for the ongoing service issues, and are working to stabilize our platform.

We had a critical failure to one of the databases supporting our account service, and as a result our login and matchmaking systems were blocked. We limited account traffic and rolled out changes to address timed-out requests to account service nodes, but these initial fixes were less resilient than we had hoped. We're working on more comprehensive upgrades to fully stabilize the system, but will need to go into emergency maintenance to apply them.”

As of right now, there’s no news as to when the servers we’ll go back up. You can check the status of the servers for yourself here, and if you need your Fortnite fix, check out these leaked skins we reported on yesterday.

P.S. Epic, have you tried turning it off and on again?