Fortnite recently started its long-awaited third chapter: the island has been turned on its head, Spider-Man has arrived with some neat web-swinging mechanics, and the future looks bright for the perennially popular battle royale/online hang-out/marketing pipeline.
But players were shocked and dismayed last night when the Fortnite servers went down for a couple of hours. The game having some matchmaking issues isn’t exactly unusual, but in this instance, players were met with an ominous “You do not have permission to play Fortnite” message.
It’s the same language you might see when receiving a ban from the servers, meaning everyone that saw it got a fright that their hard-earned collections of skins, wraps, and gliders might be forfeited.
Developer Epic Games attempted to calm things down by explaining on Twitter that:
“Fortnite is currently unavailable and players are unable to log-in while we investigate an issue. We’ll provide more info when we have a solution to bring services back online.”
Fortunately for all the bored children out there in the midst of school holidays, the game returned to full functionality about six hours later.
Epic has also promised some kind of recompense, saying that they’re doing something “to help you make up for lost time” and that players may have “one more present left to open”.
Here’s hoping it’s at least a cool new skin rather than an XP-boost or wallpaper and that Fortnite manages to solve their server issues for good. More on this as we hear it.