'Fortnite' is back online (updated)

If you had planned to play Fortnite today, you may want to make other plans. At the moment, many players are finding it impossible to log in to their accounts and play games. At 1:13PM ET, Epic Games said it was investigating "an issue," and promised to share more information once it had a solution to the problem.

Epic hasn't said what's causing the problem. However, over on its status website, the company describes the incident as a "major outage." That same webpage notes the Epic Games Store is suffering from "degraded performance," According to Downdetector, there are also reports of people being unable to play GTA Online and access Discord, but it's not clear if those incidents are related.

2021 has seen its share of notable internet outages. It was only earlier this month an Amazon Web Services networking issue led to many websites, including Disney+ and Vice, becoming inaccessible for part of the day. We'll note here Fortnite runs on an AWS backend.

Update 12/29 7:40PM ET: Epic Games confirmed Fortnite's servers are back online after the hours-long outage. "We’ll have more details next week on what we’re doing to help you make up for lost time," the company wrote in a tweet.