Fortnite told players they ‘don’t have permission to play’ just before the servers went offline

Photo illustration by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images

We have bad news if you’re on winter break and hope to play some Fortnite, as Epic Games has confirmed its battle royale shooter is down — and this time it’s not to help expand the game’s lore. According to a tweet from its own status page, “Fortnite is currently unavailable and players are unable to log-in while we investigate an issue. We’ll provide more info when we have a solution to bring services back online.”

Our own senior entertainment editor Andrew Webster has been struggling with the platform, which was telling many players, “You do not have permission to play Fortnite.” The company started investigating this issue a couple of hours ago and players have reported spotty connections ever since, but now it appears that logins are unavailable.

Around the same time the issue started, the Epic Games Store was also having problems, where some players said they couldn’t log in or even access their games for offline play. Now the Epic desktop launcher works so you can play other games on your PC, but it won’t even attempt to launch Fortnite, listing the servers as “offline.” If there’s more information or things come back up, we will update this post to let you know.