Fortnite down: Battle royale game goes offline on PS4, Xbox and PC for 'emergency downtime'

It is not clear when the problem will be fixed

Fortnite Battle Royale, one of the world's biggest games, has been offline for hours.

Players on all platforms – Xbox, PS4, PC and mobile – have been unable to access the game because of "emergency downtime". It's not clear when that will come to an end.

"We're bringing the servers offline for emergency maintenance," the game's official Twitter wrote. "We apologize for this inconvenience. We currently have no ETA on when servers will be back up."

The issue appears to be with servers run by Epic, the developers of the massively popular game. They are often taken offline for scheduled maintenance – but this outage was not planned, and has now lasted for hours.

In the tweet, developers advised players to keep looking at Epic's status page for updates on when the game will return. The latest update on that page reads: "We're still working on the database upgrade process, and remain in downtime."

According to that page, the problems have already been lasting for around 12 hours. They initially appeared to have been fixed – but then that workaround did not actually seem to work, and the game went offline again soon after.