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Battle royal juggernaut Fortnite has been offline since early this morning, and players will have to wait a few more hours to download the latest update.

By Richard Lawler, a senior editor following news across tech, culture, policy, and entertainment. He joined The Verge in 2021 after several years covering news at Engadget.

Promotional image for the new season of Fortnite, showing the season’s new character skins around the game’s logo.
Fortnite Chapter 5 Season 2: Myths & Mortals

Image: Epic Games

The launch of Fortnite’s Greek mythology-themed Chapter 5: Season 2 has been on hold since early this morning after the usual downtime for maintenance didn’t end on schedule. Epic usually takes the servers down at 3AM ET to prepare for a big update, but then the battle royale game never came back online, with messages saying the work would take a few hours longer than usual.

The most recent message from the Fortnite Status account on X came just after 4PM ET, telling players they could preload the new update “in approximately five hours.” How long will it take until everyone is able to log in and actually play? We don’t know yet, but we’ll update you on the issue as more information comes in.

For now, players will have to try something else, but maybe not Helldivers 2 — that game has also been experiencing server issues over the last few hours, according to reports tracked by DownDetector.