Fortnite is down on October 3 for extended maintenance

Fortnite promo image for Rainbow Royale event

(Image credit: Epic)

Fortnite's servers are down for a lengthy maintenance period on Monday, October 3, according to the official Fortnite Status Twitter account.

The server outage for the battle royale was intentional, prepping the game for its next update: Update 22.10. But it hasn't quite gone to plan. Maintenance downtime was set to begin at 4 am EST on October 4. Instead, it began nearly 12 hours early, around 5 pm EST.

"Due to an issue, we are entering downtime early," Fortnite Status tweeted. "Update 22.10 will still release tomorrow October 4th."

Epic didn't provide an estimate for how long Fortnite will be offline, but did say it'll let players know when the downtime has ended. With the update still planned for Tuesday, the maintenance may last until at least midnight EST, or even through its originally planned window.

Normally, we'd expect Fortnite server maintenance to last 2-4 hours, though downtime can be longer for big updates. It's unclear why exactly Epic initiated this downtime earlier than planned. Servers should be back online sometime on Tuesday, October 4.

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