Fortnite down: Outage leaves players unable to login or join game

Issues with the Epic Games hit game affected thousands of players

Fortnite players reported issues with the game (iStock)

A major outage affecting Fortnite left thousands of players unable to log in to the popular online video game for several hours.

Players took to social media on Wednesday to complain of problems logging in and long queues to join games.

Fortnite developer Epic Games posted several issues to its status page, including a "partial outage" of Game Services and "degraded performance" for Login and Matchmaking.

Huge numbers of reports flooded into monitoring sites like Down Detector from people facing the issues.

"We are investigating an issue causing some players to encounter a problem with game services and when attempting to log in," stated a post from the official Fortnite Twitter account.

A few hours later, the game issued an update through its official Reddit account.

"We've deployed a fix addressing the issues encountered earlier today," the post stated. "Login and Game Services have been restored and the elf is back on the shelf. Players that have earned the Take The Elf emote will now receive it as a gift or immediately after completion."

Fortnite has become one of the most popular video games in the world since launching in 2017.

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The battle royale game now has more than 200 million players around the world, with Epic Games now valued at over $15 billion.

The game's popularity has attracted cyber criminals, who target players through social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

An investigation by cyber security firm ZeroFox earlier this year revealed more than 53,000 instances of online scams relating to Fortnite between early September and early October.