Fortnite was down for thousands of players on Tuesday as matchmaking errors spread beyond one server area and left some users unable to queue into a game. Epic Games said it was investigating the problem and later acknowledged that the issue was showing up in more than one region.
That is why searches for is fortnite down spiked on Tuesday: Downdetector logged more than 1,800 complaints, with users reporting matchmaking and loading issues at the same time Epic’s own status page flagged trouble with Fortnite. One player wrote, “Is Fortnite down rn? Why can't I que anything,” while another said, “No games loading. Creative or BR.” A third complained, “Matchmaking not working at all. Can barely even load up Save The World, let alone try to play a match there, or in BR.”
Epic Games first said it was working to fix matchmaking errors in the Middle East server region that were preventing players from queueing into a game. It later said it was seeing the same problem in other regions, where players were being forced to queue more than once to find a match. The company also said it remained under investigation and would post more updates as the service returned to normal.
The spread matters because it makes the usual player-side fixes look limited. Suggested steps included clearing the Custom Matchmaking Key and hitting Accept, switching the region setting from Auto to the nearest physical server, closing and relaunching the Epic Game Launcher, verifying game files and restarting the router. But if the outage is global, those steps are unlikely to help much, and some players were already finding that out the hard way.
One user said Fortnite had “discoed me in the middle of a creative game, wont connect,” while another wrote, “Private lobbies aren't even working.” For now, the open question is not whether players were affected — they were — but how long Epic will take to bring matchmaking fully back online across every region.
