Fortnite Chapter Five, season two kicks off today, March 8. But with the servers offline, players are waiting and wondering when they’ll finally be able to jump into the battle royale.
The game is unavailable, and Epic Games has failed to provide details on when it might return online. Don’t worry, though. Here’s everything you need to know about the current downtime.
Why are the Fortnite servers down?
The Fortnite servers are offline simply because they are getting updated. As expected, Chapter Five, season two is a hefty update, so it’s no surprise to see the servers down for a few hours while Epic rolls everything out.
Fortunately for players, as soon as everything is ready, the servers will return to their former glory, and we have a good idea of when that might be.
When will Fortnite servers be back online?
The servers went down around 2am CT time, and the game is usually updated between 1am and 5am CT (8am and 12pm CET). But, in this case, the downtime is taking much longer than expected. Just a bit after 8am CT (3pm CET), the Fortnite Status page on X (formerly Twitter) revealed that the update is taking longer to launch and will need an additional eight hours. Therefore, Fortnite fans expected Chapter Five, season two to go live around 4:30pm CT.
But then, at 3pm CT, Epic tweeted that a pre-download for the update should be available in roughly five hours. Since that’s just a pre-download, however, it’s unclear exactly when the new season will start. This latest update, though, means it’s unlikely to start any time before 9pm CT.
Chapter Five, Season Two of Fortnite is now live. Be aware that long queue times may be encountered as you log on to the servers. Ensure you have restarted the game and downloaded the update!
Luckily for fans, Epic already posted the patch notes on Fortnite’s official page, so there’s no doubt the game servers are currently being updated. Follow Fortnite’s server status for the latest updates.
