'Fortnite' Servers Down: When Will Epic Fix 'Waiting in Queue' Login Problem?

Fortnite players have been left frustrated as the popular battle royale video game faces "emergency maintenance" which has resulted in downtime and widespread outages beginning on Wednesday (April 11). Its developer—Epic Games—is working on a fix.

A status website shows that multiple issues have been reported overnight, starting late Wednesday, including problems with player accounts and lobby logins that were blamed on a database failure. A separate issue with the firm's email service left two-factor authentication and password resets backlogged, Epic said.

On Thursday, the update read: "The initial fix was unable to handle returning traffic, and we're again experiencing issues with login success. We'll be undergoing emergency downtime to deploy major upgrades to our database systems. We're still working on the database upgrade process and remain in downtime."

An announcement sent from the Fortnite Twitter page confirmed that servers had been taken offline for maintenance. There was no estimated recovery time. Users can find out the latest status updates via: https://status.epicgames.com.

Unsurprisingly, players quickly took to Twitter to vent their anger directly at Epic Games. Many complained about lengthy queue times and error messages. At the time of writing, the latest series of outages have been ongoing for over 12 hours.

Fortnite, which remains in early access on PS4, Xbox One, PC and iOS, has faced service problems in the past. Epic has been consistently updating the game with new content and stability patches. It has been a runaway success for Epic Games, which launched the free spin-off of its main Fortnite game to compete with its equally titanic rival, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds.

The genre—which pits players against each other until only one is left standing—gained another competitor this week in the form of Radical Heights, developed by Boss Key Productions. After being released to mobile, Fortnite was reportedly a massive distraction for school children, leaving teachers frustrated over its popularity.