Fortnite servers went down for over 7 hours, here is why more outages may occur

Yesterday, Fortnite servers experienced the longest outage of 2021 as they went down for a little over 7 hours. Winterfest 2021 (which is currently ongoing) has caused a massive influx of players joining the game in hopes of unlocking all 14 free rewards. This issue is expected to be the primary cause of the downtime that players witnessed yesterday.

However, the servers are now back online and players can hop into the game to get back on the grind.

Epic Games has been on winter break which is presumably why it took so long to get the servers back up. While fans hope it was the last time that they faced a downtime this severe, it is highly likely that more outages may occur as players pour in at large numbers to redeem their WinterFest rewards.

The Fortnite community is known to be impatient and a seven-hour downtime, without notice, only made things worse. Many had also anticipated that Epic Games will issue some kind of free gift just to make up for the lost time. Which, did turn out to be true after all.

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Fortnite servers may continue to be erratic in the coming days

While Fortnite Chapter 3 in itself has seen swarms of players, both old and new, rushing to explore an all new island. Winterfest 2021 may just be the primary culprit behind the consistent outages throughout the month of December.

Since Winterfest is time-limited, players will be unable to redeem Frozen Peely, Blizabelle, FFrosty back bling and any WinterFest 2021 that is currently available in the game, come January 2022.

Popular content creators and pros were also affected due to this unprecedented downtime.

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Fortnite community gifted with an extra gift in Winterfest challenge as consolation for server downtime

After a grueling seven hours of long wait, Fortnite's downtime finally came to an end. Upon visiting the Winterfest lodge, players discovered that they had an extra present that could be unlocked.

This was consistently reported by players on all platforms, which technically means that Fortnite Winterfest 2021 now has a total of 15 rewards instead of 14.

A later tweet from Fortnite confirmed that the 'extra' gift players see is compensation for downtime.

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Previously, a similar downtime issue occurred back in 2018 when players were given a free back bling. Fortnite players are now hoping that the same thing will happen and Epic Games will reward the community with a free item to make up for the loss.

Free Rust Bucket backbling awarded in 2018 (Image Credits: Epic Games)

In their latest tweet on the downtime issue featured at the start of this article, Epic said:

"We’ll have more details next week on what we’re doing to help you make up for lost time."

This can only suggest that the new year will start with free gifts in Fortnite, and understandably, some more downtime issues.