Certain Fortnite usernames are now crashing the game

Connor Bennett
Fortnite character at The Authority location

Fortnite players have been running into a strange bug that causes the battle royale to freeze and glitch if they eliminate a player who uses a certain letter or number in their name.

Even though Fortnite is pretty much the mack daddy of battle royales, that doesn’t mean Epic Games have a perfect game. The developers have done a stellar job at plugging holes and fixing issues, but there are still some lingering problems. 

Players have constantly run into problems with the servers, a lot of them disagree with the current content that is in season three – be that because of the Mauraders or Sharks – and the teleporting whirlpools don’t currently work.

However, some players have been encountering a frustrating problem that hasn’t been too big of an issue in previous seasons and actually probably needs to be seen to be believed.

Fortnite Whirlpool at Fortilla POI
Whirlpools are currently disabled in Fortnite as one of the game’s current problems.

The problem was flagged by Reddit user hobleyyy, who noted that if you kill a player who has a symbol, letter or number in their Epic Games username, your game will freeze and bug out after the elimination.

The Redditor even showed a video displaying highlights where, as they eliminated players who had a symbol in their name, the game quickly stuttered before returning back to normal a few seconds letter.

As hobleyyy showed, it wasn’t just a one-time issue, as it happened to them multiple times. The Fortnite player even noted that they’ve run into the problem in previous seasons, but Epic hasn’t fixed it just yet.

Other players even testified to having the bug hamper them as well. “Had that too, yesterday I was wondering, he had a name with only Chinese letters and it freezed for like 10 seconds, commented Clemibeast.

Given that the problem lies with a player’s username, it probably is something for Epic to investigate in order to stop it becoming a hugely widespread issue that ruins games completely. 

Wheter or not they will do so anytime soon, however, is unknown given that they’ve got a set of problems already lined up for fixes in the coming v13.30 patch.

About The Author

Based out of Liverpool, Connor is Dexerto's UK News Editor having joined the website in 2018 with a degree in International Journalism. You can find him covering everything from CoD, GTA, FIFA, Apex Legends, and influencer boxing. Need to get in touch? Email Connor at Connor.Bennett@Dexerto.com