'Fortnite' is back online after a day-long blackout

The popular game Fortnite is finally playable across all platforms after a server outage and emergency update took it offline for almost a day. According to a Reddit post by a company employee, a "critical failure with one of [the] account service databases" made the login and matchmaking systems unstable. But for their trouble, Epic Games is giving players of both the game's battle royale and tower defense modes free in-game loot.

The problems came hours after the studio updated Fornite with the large 3.5 patch yesterday (it's unclear at this time if or how the database crash derived from the update). Per Epic Games' status website, the company first reported issues with account services after 4pm ET on April 11th, and worked through the night to get the servers supporting all its games back online. At around 3:30pm ET today, the Fortnite account tweeted the all-clear (above) signaling the game was back online for all platforms. The game is back up to over 264,000 viewers on Twitch as of this writing, but even while the game was down last night, it still managed to get 50,000 people watching streamers sit at essentially blank screens.

To make up for the delay, Epic is giving Battle Royale players a free Back Bling gift this weekend and a pack of Battle Stars next week; Those who still load up the game's original Save The World mode get a Troll Stash Llama and seasonal gold. Unfortunately, the account service issues have pushed the Fortnite team to delay the debut of the new 50v50 v2 Limited Time mode until sometime next week.