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Fortnite back up after hours-long outage

Servers went offline while the game's developer investigated "stability issues."

Edward Moyer Senior Editor
Edward Moyer is a senior editor at CNET and a many-year veteran of the writing and editing world. He enjoys taking sentences apart and putting them back together. He also likes making them from scratch. ¶ For nearly a quarter of a century, he's edited and written stories about various aspects of the technology world, from the US National Security Agency's controversial spying techniques to historic NASA space missions to 3D-printed works of fine art. Before that, he wrote about movies, musicians, artists and subcultures.
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  • Ed was a member of the CNET crew that won a National Magazine Award from the American Society of Magazine Editors for general excellence online. He's also edited pieces that've nabbed prizes from the Society of Professional Journalists and others.
Edward Moyer
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Epic Games

Fans of Fortnite looking to brighten their holidays by playing the battle royale game met with problems Wednesday, as things went dark for several hours.

"Fortnite game servers are currently offline while we investigate a solution to stability issues," said a noon PT tweet from the Fortnite Status account on Twitter. An earlier tweet, at about 8 a.m., said "login, matchmaking and other issues" were being investigated, and a wrap-up tweet, at about 4 p.m., said servers were back online.

"We appreciate everyone's understanding as we worked to resolve these issues and we'll have more details next week on what we're doing to help you make up for lost time," the tweet said.

It's not the first time Epic Games' hugely popular title has had trouble. The game experienced a brief outage at least a couple of times last year, as well as in 2019 and 2018.

Fortnite Chapter 2 came to an end in early December, with Fortnite Chapter 3 kicking off not long after. The game is free to play on PC, PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch, Android, Xbox One and Xbox Series consoles. But it isn't available on iOS devices, after a legal battle between Apple and Epic Games