“Is Fortnite Down?” is a question we have all asked ourselves at some point in our time playing Fortnite Battle Royale. What do you do when your connection to the servers seems to be down or laggy? A good place to start is to check if there isn’t a problem with your local network. Check your wireless or wired connection to your router. If you can get to other sites but Fortnite is not working the the two most obvious answers to these problems are:
The internet connection to the game servers is down.
The servers themselves are down.
How to check you internet connection?
Pings to Fortnite
There are a few things you can do to check if your internet connection is down or if your connection to the epic games servers is having issues.
Check your Fortnite ping . This site will show you the pings to all available fortnite servers. If you know which server region is your closest and this site is saying that your ping to that server is bad. Then there is obviously problems with your connection to that region.
Are Epic servers down
If the ping seems OK then checking if the actual Fortnite servers are down is the next step. The site you are currently on is well known for checking server status. It does this by looking for social chatter about Fortnite. It checks the official Fortnite twitter account amongst many others to try and get a sense of if there is something wrong with the servers.
Where else can you check?
FortniteBR subreddit is a great place to see if there is any chatter about the game having problems.
Epic used to have a great forum that kept players up to date on what was happening with Fortnite but recently they shut it down. We here at Game Server Pings think that was a mistake. It was a pretty vibrant little community and was a little more informative than reddit.com.
Are you getting lag in Fortnite? You might not be connecting to your local server.
High ping or latency is only one of the many possible issues when Fortnite starts feeling laggy, although it is probably the most common. What is lag? It can be caused by a few things but the most common cause is connection distance/time between a players PC and the server the game is running on. The data being sent between the PC and server is being delyaed by a slow connection so both machines are often waiting for the next piece of information to arrive before being able to make decisions on that data. This ends up feeling like the game is reacting slowly to the players input.
Another possibility is that servers themselves are under load which can manifest as lag but more often than not you will notice this as in-game stuttering or as gamers have termed it rubber banding. In a third person shooter or Battle Royale like Fortnite, if an opponent is rubber banding the player’s character will make random jerky movements and can make them harder to hit. Often if someone else’s character is rubber banding then your own character will appear to be doing the same to them. It’s not a great experience for either party.
Another thing we need to take into consideration when discussing Fortnite servers is that Fortnite has inbuilt lag compensation. What is lag compensation? It is an inbuilt prediction formula that will let Fortnite guess where a player is at the time that another player takes a shot at them. What lag compensation isn’t is the throttling of fast connections to make everyone play on a similar ping. This is a myth that still prevails amongst some Fortnite players. Fortnite’s netcode and lag compensation is state of the art, while it will give the shooter priority and on occasion players will take damage or even dying behind cover. However, it is very rare especially when compared to other BR games.
Where are Fortnite Servers Located?
Fortnite and in fact most Epic games use AWS (Amazon Web Services) as the infrastructure to run games on. This cloud based service by Amazon is easily the biggest and most widely used cloud infrastructure at the time of publishing of this article. Although Google’s Cloud Computing Services is gaining ground on Amazon. What does this mean to the average player of Fortnite? It means that when connecting to Fortnite, there are a number of hops that every connections must take. Amazon’s world wide cloud computing distribution means that there are relatively few hops before you network packet finds its way to the entrance points of the Amazon cloud. Once inside the AWS infrastructure traffic flows across a very fast private fibre network. See the map below to find the closest epic games servers to you.
Fortnite Server Locations
This isn’t the end of the story for a Fortnite players network traffic. Fortnite’s matchmaking will try and select the closest server to you when you load the game. This is not foolproof, occasionally Fortnite will try and connect a player to a server that is further away or the server closest you may indeed be laggy for some reason. If this happens the game can feel very laggy and you might want to try and reset the server connection. If this has happened to you do the following.
Check the Fortnite Status and see if there is a problem with your region.
Check your Fortnite Server Ping. This will show you which server has the lowest latency.
If one or both above checks are highlighting a problem with the closest region to you then you can change the matchmaking region in the game. Do this by doing the following.
Enter game settings.
Open the game tab.
Select matchmaking Region.
Apply the changes.
Use Matchmaking Region to select a new Fortnite server
What are the Fortnite Server Regions?
Below we have listed all the known (as of publication) Fortnite server regions. Fortnite is constantly adding server capacity as the game’s player base is not reducing but holding steady and even increasing slightly in last few months.
Fortnite Server Regions (updated for 2020)
Ohio, USA
Virginia, USA
California, USA
Oregon, USA
Tokyo, Japan
South Korea
Osaka, Japan
Singapore
Australia
Canada
Frankfurt, Germany
Ireland
London, UK
Paris, France
Sao Paulo, Brazil
We will be updating this list if Epic decides to change and/or remove any AWS regions. We will also update if Epic moves to another server provider.
