Fortnite Downtime: What’s Actually Happening

Look, I’ve been there. You are excited about the new season drop, you are off your evening, have snacks packed, when you get a bang. Maintenance server is down. Personally, I would get rather hysterical about Fortnite downtime, but here is what I learned after spending too many Tuesday mornings from my seat with Fortnite loading screens.

I want to deconstruct what is actually happening behind the sign saying please wait and more importantly how you can actually utilize that dead time, rather than rage-quitting to a different game.

What’s Actually Happening During Fortnite Downtime?

The point is there is no downtime when Epic switches the switch and a day is a day. It has much action in the background and it is not as irritating to wait when you know things are going on there.

The Three categories of the downtime you will encounter.

All time-out is not produced equal. This is something I had to experience in order to bring a routine patch to a Chapter launch (wait time hi-fi time).

The routine maintenance normally occurs on a Tuesday at around 4:00 AM ET. It’s quick – maybe 1-2 hours max. Fixing bugs, weapon balancing, or exploits by Epic. Nothing crazy.

The large ones are season launches. We are talking of 4-6 hours of server downtime. Why so long? They are literally replacing the current map, transferring millions of player accounts across to different databases, and even in some cases even moving to a new version of Unreal Engine. At the technical load is huge.

The wild card is the emergency maintenance. Crashes of the servers, impossibility to log in, or matchmaking failures – all of them appear randomly and can take between 30 minutes and a few hours. No one likes these.

The “Thundering Herd” Problem

This is a crazy fact I came to learn: the most difficult part is not to turn servers off but to turn them on.

Attempting to log in at the same moment (say, 5:00 pm IST when servers open) by millions of players absolutely kills the authentication system of Epic. Although the game servers may be prepared, the login servers may crash with such a load. That is why we have these irritating queue screens appearing immediately after the downtimes.

They are deliberately choking log-in attempting y recognition – allowing perhaps 10,000 players log-in at any given moment rather than the entire 10 million.

It is irritating, but it is better than staring at the servers that crash completely (been there too).

Fortnite Entering Downtimes: How to Survive.

Okay, enough technical stuff. This is what I really do when I encounter such a maintenance screen.

Download the Patch Immediately

The second idle period begins, and open your Epic Launcher (or PlayStation/Xbox). The new patch typically gets released in the time of downtime and not after the fact. I cannot describe how many times I heard friends moaning about servers being up and I cannot play, -because they have not updated.

This is because when downloading it when servers are off, you will be prepared the moment they switch on again.

Check the Real Status (Not Just Twitter Panic)

It is common knowledge that whenever the Twitter dies everyone swampers the Twitter feed but half of those IS IT DOWN?s. posts are just noise. I bookmark three things:

• The official status page of Epic this is the truth.
• FortniteStatus on Twitter – they write the ETA and bug updates.
• DownDetector: Fortnite – notifies you when it is affecting the whole world, or just your network.

Spare me reading unfounded doomscrolling posts in the Reddit pages when everybody calls guesses.

Turn Downtime Into Content (If You Stream)

This is one tip that I learned by observing SypherPK during downtimes: do not go offline. Host a “waiting room” stream.

Read patch notes out loud. Discuss leaks. Check the countdown timer together with your chat. There is no other place players can go when they are not playing, stream becomes the place of gathering. There are streamers who regularly reach their peak ratings during such slots as all the players are simply waiting.

And even when you aren’t streaming, spend the time to keep up with the things that are evolving. Patch notes are important, or at least they are.

Understand “Zero Hour” Events

This one blew my mind. Remember the Big Bang event? Or the 37 hours Black Hole? Epic became an aspect of downtime.

Even now when big Chapter launches occur, they leave you logged in but in a waiting room, fish out in space as countdowns run, having narrative experiences. You are on-line, but the big game is being running in the background. It is genius marketing, being frank. Loss of time was now entertainment.

And when you have an event called a Zero Hour announced then do not log off. That’s part of the show now.

The Bottom Line

I used to be crazy because of the downtime of Fortnite, but then I nailed down that the live-service game is always like that. The fact that Epic serves millions of players in dozens of AWS areas, shifts the data, and attempts not to destroy everything during this process.

The next time you encounter that maintenance screen you should not rage quit. Get the patch and monitor the status page, possibly watch content creators as well as wait stuck. The servers will be back – they will normally show up quicker than you believe.

And, just in case you are too fond of the technical side you can even use Epic with their own API to create your own status tracker. I have not successfully dug that deep as yet, but it is there when you desire it.

Then you understand what is taking place when those servers get shut down. Behold me on the Battle Bus the opposite they will spin.

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