Fortnite has become hugely popular and last weekend there were 3.4 million concurrent players playing the game, and no doubt most were playing the free Battle Royale.
The sheer volume of players joining the game has hit Epic’s infrastructure hard and they have been struggling to cope with the volume of players. This has led to all kinds of issues causing service disruption.
Today Epic released a post-mortem of events for 3/4 February outages detailing exactly what went wrong when there was an extreme load. Simply put, the whole system that handles user data and social features was not coping.
Epic has outlined a number of steps to stabilise all Fortnite services and it’s a long list. Epic concluded the update with a note to all players:
“Problems that affect service availability are our primary focus above all else right now. We want you all to know we take these outages very seriously, conducting in-depth post-mortems on each incident to identify the root cause and decide on the best plan of action. The online team has been working diligently over the past month to keep up with the demand created by the rapid week-over-week growth of our user base.”
Epic is now appealing to the community to apply for jobs because Fortnite‘s growth has been a lot faster than they ever expected. This is likely one of the reasons they canned their MOBA Paragon quickly. That decision was a real wasted opportunity for Epic and it’s a decision that may come back to bite them further down the line when the battle royale market becomes more saturated and gamers move on to other titles.
