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

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.” A follow-up tweet at 3:10PM ET from the team says they are “continuing to work on a fix that will bring Fortnite back online and appreciate everyone’s patience.”

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.

When the servers initially went down, the Epic Games launcher wouldn’t even start Fortnite, showing the servers were offline, but now it will try to launch the game. Unfortunately, after launching, as many players have reported and we experienced in a test, it simply places you in a queue for ten minutes or so, then fails to connect fully.

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 at least the Epic Games desktop launcher is working so you can still play other games on your PC.

Update December 29th, 3:00PM ET: Added details about current server status and issues logging in.

Update December 29th, 3:18PM ET: Added latest tweet about Fortnite server restoration progress.