The joy of Epic Games didn’t last long: although Apple has restored the developer account of the company’s Swedish subsidiary (already mentioned in today’s news), it must have caused headaches.

Fortnite’s second season, chapter five, was supposed to launch yesterday, but Epic Games announced that while the game was offline, it ran into an unexpected problem that’s not so easy to recover from. The developers ran into the problem during maintenance and had to extend the offline state of the game for at least (!) eight hours and apologized that the new content update for Battle Royale will be released later than planned. The developers are working hard to fix this unnamed bug and will report back when they have more information.

Then last night, at 1 PM Pacific (about seven hours after their first tweet), they were still working on bringing Fortnite back, and then they posted that they would be preloading the updated v29.00 version of Fortnite in about five hours, so around 6 PM. Then around 8 pm, there were bugs in shopping, redemption, and matchmaking, which the studio fixed by 9 pm, but there were stability issues on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, and queue times fluctuated, and Epic Games is still working on that.

The problem is not that the big content update is not seamless. They usually are. Fortnite is no exception. However, it’s rare for season changes and content upgrades to take much longer than usual because they made the game with an in-house engine, so you can’t blame them for not knowing the technology.

Still, we didn’t expect such a lengthy downtime for Epic Games’ title, and considering that Fortnite is still relatively successful with so many crossovers, the company might have encountered some losses.

Source: PCGamer