The popular battle royale game, Fortnite, was down for a few hours. TechCrunch reports that players reported long load times when queueing, which eventually time out, as well as issues when logging into Fortnite’s servers. The company has acknowledged the issue and says that it has since rectified it. “We've deployed a fix addressing the issues encountered earlier today. Login and Game Services have been restored and the elf is back on the shelf. Players who have earned the Take The Elf Emote will now receive it as a gift or immediately after completion,” the company tweeted.
An employee of Epic Games explained the problem on Reddit. According to the post, the problem stemmed from another bug that caused the Elf Challenge reward to not be granted. This apparently exposed a latent bug in the profile migration code that fixes up players. This caused players to be kicked and triggered the waiting room.
The company notes in the reddit post, “Quick summary is that deploying a fix for elf challenge reward not being granted exposed a latent bug in our profile migration code (the code that fixes up players). This caused players to be kicked etc and triggered our waiting room. We fixed the issue and deployed a new backend, however didn’t see recovery in login success. This ended up due to “sticky session” configuration having been lost on our waiting room load balances when moving them to ALBs. This meant that there was a 90% chance of having to requeue after hitting the front of the line. D’oh. This should all be fixed now and we are seeing recovery in numbers / login throughout / waiting room / etc,”
The outage came around the time of the holidays. So it did lead to some outrage amongst the players who planned to game in their free time. Thankfully, Epic Games managed to fix the problem within a few hours.
https://twitter.com/FortniteGame/status/1078065448585965568?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw