Fortnite downtime extended by 8 hours due to maintenance issues

Fortnite Chapter 5 Season 2 is coming, just not as quickly as we'd hoped

There’s been plenty of excitement today about the launch of Fortnite Chapter 5 Season 2, also known as Fortnite Myths & Mortals, but unfortunately, we’re all going to have to sit around and wait for longer than expected to play it.

The downtime started at 3am ET this morning and was expected to last until somewhere between 7am-9am so we could all start playing as soon as we got up, but that hasn’t come to pass.

Hey everyone, we encountered an unexpected issue during our maintenance and we need to extend downtime at least 8 additional hours.

We apologize for making everyone wait longer than usual to drop into Chapter 5 Season 2 of Battle Royale. The team is working through this as… pic.twitter.com/gsu79mGMiJ

— Fortnite Status (@FortniteStatus) March 8, 2024

As announced by the official Fortnite Status Twitter account at 9am ET, the downtime has to be extended by a whopping eight hours, meaning that we won’t be able to start playing until at least 5pm ET. According to Fortnite Status, this is due to “an unexpected issue during our maintenance”, which can happen with an update as big as this one promises to be.

Depending on how things go at Epic, this downtime could end up lasting even longer than that, but we won’t know until nearer the time. If you want to stay updated then you can follow Fortnite Status on Twitter, and regularly check in with our Fortnite servers down guide, which we will add to whenever we hear updates on the server status.

In the meantime, you can get yourself hyped up and ready to play with our Fortnite Chapter 5 Season 2 patch notes, as well as every unique skin in the Fortnite Myths & Mortals Battle Pass.