Epic Games Explains Why the Fortnite Battle Royale Servers Have Gone Down for the Third Day in a Row

The Fortnite Battle Royale developers have released a statement to explain why the servers have gone down for maintenance yet again on June 1st.

Players of the incredibly popular Epic Games title were left disillusioned late on June 1st when they logged in and found that the servers were down for the third day in a row.

The V4.3.0 update was released on May 30th, introducing the all-new Shopping Carts and various bug fixes but servers went down again 24 hours later as a number of issues related to the patch had to be addressed.

However, it looks like there were still some issues and Epic Games’ Mark Imbriaco took to Reddit late on May 31st to reveal that the servers would be going down once again at 04:00am ET (08:00am UTC) on June 1st.

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The reason for the downtime is apparently down to the ongoing difficulties with “scaling the backend MongoDB database we use for much of our account and matchmaking system”.

Imbriaco says that the Fortnite Battle Royale team has been working on rolling out a “brand new, horizontally scalable, session tracking service to manage sessions for matchmaking” but that there have been numerous issues with this and they are now reverting to the old system for the time being.

The full statement can be found below.

Hi everybody!

We wanted to give you a heads up that we’re planning another maintenance window tomorrow, June 1, at 4 AM ET (8 AM UTC).

During this time, matchmaking will be unavailable for Fortnite Battle Royale. This will be the third day in a row that we’ve had a scheduled maintenance window. I can explain.

We mentioned back in February scaling the backend MongoDB database that we use for much of our account and matchmaking system has been a challenge. We’ve made a ton of progress and our database has never been in a better place than it is right now, but we knew that it wasn’t the right fit to handle our continued growth and new types of LTMs. The Playground LTM v1, for example, has a maximum of 4 players per game which means we’ll need a lot more game instances and matchmaking sessions to support that mode than we do a mode like Battle Royale that can support up to 100 players per instance.

Over the last couple of days we’ve been working on rolling out a brand new, horizontally scalable, session tracking service to manage sessions for matchmaking. Despite extensive testing over the last few weeks, we ran into some problems when we attempted to put it into production. First, we ran into an issue with the way the system handled the case of many thousands of empty game servers, just waiting for people to drop at Tilted, that caused a lot more data to be returned by queries to the service than we expected. We solved that problem and tried to deploy again this morning, and while performance looked good we ran into a problem with the way our dedicated server auto-scaling systems interacted with the session tracker that required us to revert to the previous system again.

We’d like to offer a huge thank you to the community for being so patient when we’ve had to take maintenance windows — we know you’d rather be playing and we really appreciate all the support. We’re looking forward to seeing you continue to surprise us with your creativity in Playground soon!

Thanks,

Mark Imbriaco

Technical Director, Operations & Reliability