Epic Temporaly Disabled Fortnite Matchmaking After Popularity Boom
Epic have done a fine job of scaling with the Fortnite demand, usually getting on top of any issues and providing a mainly stable online game with little downtime. It’s certainly been more ahead of the curve than its closest rival, anyway.
However, Epic probably couldn’t have predicted that Drake would stream with Ninja and break Twitch records, leading to a huge spike in new players. The recent mobile version of Fortnite launching is also a pretty big deal, especially as it allows cross-play; there are a lot of people on a lot of different platforms trying to play the same game.
After playing a couple of solo games, numerous players reported getting hit with an error message.
Following twenty minutes of stubborn retrying, the official Twitter account for Fortnite tweeted out that they have had to disable matchmaking as a result of the sudden rise in popularity:
The love is strong! Due to an influx of new players, we're experiencing degradation with our matchmaking. We're disabling matchmaking and scaling up to account for this.
The matchmaking has already returned to the time of this writing, because Epic did perform maintenance the next morning to presumably deal with the surge of new players, which may have knocked something out of sync.
Saying that, though, large updates and the ensuing issues have taken the game offline not for the first time.
