Fortnite players were hit with serious downtime on April 6, finding themselves unable to log into the game, and that people suddenly went missing from their Friends lists. While the situation returned to normal within a few hours, Epic Games set about not just fixing the underlying issues but gauging how it might be able to prevent repeat incidents in the future. There are several steps the company now says it's taking to keep the popular battle royale going.
A simple explanation of what happened is that an expired certificate - code that verifies software's trustworthiness - triggered outages across Fortnite's backend infrastructure. That meant that Epic accounts were unable to authenticate, and by extension, let players actually get online. Brief outages aren't uncommon with massively multiplayer games - yet the April 6 incident lasted over 3 hours, which probably created some serious ripples given the game's millions of players worldwide, as Fortnite fans wanting to stream or access the game were unable to do so.
According to Epic, a "myriad of factors, both technological and organizational" were to blame, and that it immediately switched to a new certificate monitoring system and set about auditing all existing certificates. The company is also planning "future-proofing" in the form of AWS (Amazon Web Services) Config monitoring, and limiting the "blast radius" of certificates. Epic didn't specify what the latter means, but this presumably translates into fewer systems needing fixing if a certificate is allowed to lapse. Conceivably, it could mean a percentage of players getting to stay online, though this is by no means guaranteed.
Why Fixing Fortnite's Online Backbone Is Complicated
Work is also being done on bugs discovered via the Epic Games Launcher's "client call" patterns. To the benefit of Fortnite in general, Epic is upgrading its ability to handle traffic spikes, reducing data packet loss when large numbers of players are online. Overload is one of the more common causes of server downtime - in fact, a standard cyberattack technique, known as Denial of Service, involves bombarding servers in the same way players might when a fresh update goes live.
Lastly, Epic is patching the Epic Games Store to "prevent modifying a live application object," and says that it encountered and solved an "asset generation" glitch at the same time. The company hasn't explained how those flaws were related to certificate difficulties. Anything that stabilizes the game's backend, though, is no doubt a little more peace of mind for gamers who hold Fortnite as a major hobby.
Source: Epic Games