Ahead of Fortnite’s latest update, the Epic Games team shut off the game servers. The maintenance suddenly happened tonight, and the team has announced that they will not return until sometime in the early morning. The maintenance is preparing for update 22.10, expected to drop in the early morning of October 4.
The announcement of the servers going down happened shortly after 5 PM ET on the Fortnite Status page.
“Due to an issue, we are entering downtime early,” reads the Fortnite Status tweet, following the announcement of the upcoming update for 22.10. “Update 22.10 will still release tomorrow, October 4. We’ll let you all know when downtime has ended!”
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The tweet does not offer an official time for the servers’ return. However, the original downtime was scheduled to happen at 8 AM UTC or 4 AM UTC. Instead, it happened 11 hours earlier, surprising everyone. We do not believe this was scheduled maintenance from the Epic Games team, but the decision was likely made to ensure a smooth update time for players early on October 4.
With the maintenance happening earlier than expected for Fortnite’s update 22.10, we expect it to follow the same pattern of being available early in the morning for October 4. However, we do not have any confirmation from the Epic Games team. We imagine if they have to take longer with their maintenance, they will reach out to players through their Fortnite status and will likely reply to the thread they’ve already made for update 22.10.
It’s surprising the servers had to be taken down earlier than expected, but it’s good to see the communication from the Epic Games team. While players won’t be able to access to game throughout Monday night, it’s better than dealing with any problems throughout the week.