Tuesday is the day of the week when Epic Games normally shuts down the Fortnite servers in order to apply an update. So when it announces the servers will go down on a Thursday, it’s more likely that the company wants to fix a problem that’s causing a lot of headaches for players.
It wasn’t long after the release of Fortnite Season 5 last week that issues with the game started popping up. Epic dealt with the problems in a timely fashion, but some players continue to have trouble playing Fortnite. The developer announced Wednesday it will take down the game Thursday morning for maintenance and there are a few problems it could try to fix with this downtime.
Fortnite High Pings
Do a quick search on Twitter, and it’s clear that many players are experiencing higher pings than normal causing their games to lag. Most tweets will also point out how the issue started after the release of Fortnite Season 5. It’s unclear on whether the issue is a matter of not enough server bandwidth to accommodate the growing number of players or if there was some bad coding in the Season 5 update.
Fortnite Matchmaking
Tuesday night, Epic tweeted there were matchmaking issues with the game that affected players. Matchmaking refers to the service used to gather 100 players waiting to play the game and place them in a match. For various reasons, it can lead to players’ inability to find a match for quite some time. This was one of the problems players experienced with the release of both Fortnite Season 5 and Playground Limited Time Mode.
Fortnite Voice Chat
Another ongoing problem with Fortnite, as evidenced by its inclusion on the game’s Trello board, is voice chat. Both PC and PS4 players have trouble communicating with teammates in the game, and like the previous issues, this became more of a problem after the release of Fortnite Season 5. Epic even tweeted about the problem recurring Tuesday night.
Epic did not announce how long the downtime will be for Thursday’s maintenance, but if it’s longer than an hour, it might mean there was a lot to fix.
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