Epic Issues Statement On Downtime For Chapter 5, Season 2

Update (10:20 PM ET): At long last, Fortnite is back online. Enjoy.

If you woke up expecting to play Fortnite Chapter 5, season 2, you’re not alone, but for some reason, downtime for the season start is still ongoing, and now Epic has issued a statement about it.

“We’re still working through some updates during downtime and will provide more information once our v29.00 downtime has ended.”

That does not sound particularly good, and we are now past the point in time when season 1 debuted a few months back, as that was fully online and playable by 8 AM ET. And that was a much larger update with the release of LEGO, racing and music modes at the same time, in addition to being the launch of a fully new chapter.

Update: It is now EIGHT extra hours of downtime, according to Epic, which is pretty wild for a launch day:

Update (2 PM ET): It’s now five more hours, around 8 PM ET, 12 hours after it should have gone live.

Fans have been itching to play the Greek Mythology-based Odyssey season, and while players are able to see a bunch of skins and map locations and battle pass items and such due to dataminers extracting things from the game, the actual game itself is still not playable as we speak, and Epic is not even issuing a timeline on when it might be up. They’ll “provide more information” once downtime has actually ended.

You can boot up Fortnite and download the actual season update, but you will not be able to play even if you do that until they put servers back online after downtime ends. This is certainly not the first time we have experienced extended downtime for the launch of a new Fortnite season, and it may not even be that long of an ordeal. It is a little weird to not have more information or a timeline from Epic here (update: we now have one), but we’ll see what happens soon enough I imagine. But if you’re in the US, no, you are probably not getting a few games of Fortnite in before work or school.

Stay tuned, and I will do my best to update this post with new information or when downtime actually ends. Hopefully it won’t be very long now, but I’m sure many players are disappointed all the same, given that things have usually kicked back online by this point in the launch of a new season. But what’s a few more hours, right?

Update: Fortnite now says downtime will be “a few hours longer than usual.” Later, they said it was eight hours.

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