Epic Games has the daunting task of maintaining one of the world’s most popular battle royales. But Fortnite, despite its increasing popularity, isn’t without its issues. Catering to over 100 million players certainly isn’t easy.
The game often goes down for maintenance, especially when a new chapter, season, or patch launches. For example, Fortnite was expected to go down around 2am CT on March 8, 2024, to prepare for the Chapter Five, season two update. When the servers go down, you can experience errors like the LS-0016 error code as you try to log in.
The servers will likely be down while Epic works to get everything up and running, but they should be up and running by around 4 or 5am CT. Having said that, Fortnite could be facing any number of issues at any time. The servers are usually operational, but not always. There’s also scheduled downtime to bear in mind, which usually takes place every Tuesday, but unforeseeable outages also regularly occur.
How do you check Fortnite‘s server status?
If you’re unsure if Fortnite is down or the issue is on your end, the first place you should look is Epic’s status page. This is where the developer posts when any of its systems are down across all the games it manages.
If everything is green and “operational” on Epic’s front, the problems you’re facing are likely related to your internet service provider or hardware, and are out of Epic’s hands. If the Epic store is down or Fortnite is facing issues, though, the site will say “under maintenance” instead.
Another place to look is DownDetector. If Epic’s status page isn’t giving you the answers you’re looking for, DownDetector should give you a better understanding. The website provides up-to-date information, highlighting any outages over the past 24 hours. If Fortnite is down or experiencing problems, the site should give you a clear indication.
You can also check the Fortnite Status Twitter account. If the servers are down, it will tell you everything you need to know, whether there’s scheduled maintenance taking place or something else entirely.
Why can’t you play Fortnite?
If you can’t log into Fortnite at the time of a patch release, which generally occurs at the end of chapters and seasons, the servers are likely down. When Fortnite servers aren’t functioning due to maintenance, players must wait until Epic rolls out the new patch.
With the patch going live, servers will come back to life and players will be able to play Fortnite again.
What is wrong with Fortnite?
Fortnite can go down occasionally around the time of content patches, but that doesn’t mean anything is wrong with the game. Major releases often require Epic to take down Fortnite‘s servers, meaning players won’t be able to play until the servers are back online.
If there’s a major patch release, you might simply need to wait out the server outage and download the latest update in the process.
