'Fortnite' Servers Are Down, Here's When Chapter 5, Season 1 Begins

Fortnite Chapter 5, Season 1 is almost here.

Update 12/03/2023. See updates below.

It’s a big weekend for Fortnite fans.

Fortnite OG, after less than a month-long season, has come to an end. The wildly popular season, which returned to the original map, saw over 100 million players over the course of November, making it the most popular season of the free-to-play Battle Royale game ever.

The OG season was capped off by a massive live-event featuring rapper Eminem. The Big Bang event also showed off three new games coming to the Fortnite experience:

LEGO Fortnite

The live-event was so popular that many players, including me, were met with hour-long queues and couldn’t login to join the fun. Fortunately, Epic is running the event two more times today.

Now, Epic has disabled all Fortnite experiences and game modes except player-created content for the rest of the day as the game’s developers prepare for Chapter 5, Season 1. The new season is being called Underground. You can watch the trailer for the new season (featuring Family Guy’s Peter Griffin and Metal Gear’s Snake) right here.

All of this is anticipation of the new Chapter 5, Season 1 and a brand new map. Servers will be going down later so that Epic can push the update. Server downtime kicks off at 11:30 pm ET / 8:30 pm PT. Typically these big seasonal updates take a few hours, and this one might take a bit longer given it’s a brand new Chapter as well, with a whole new map and more. There’s not an exact time for the new season to go live, but expect it sometime early morning on Sunday, December 3rd. You should be able to install the update by the time you wake up in the morning.

The three new games—LEGO Fortnite, Rocket Racing and Fortnite Festival—will all kick off after the start of the new season next week.

Servers are now down and Fortnite is unplayable until Epic pushes the new patch. This one is going to take longer than usual according to the developer. When the update is ready, be prepared for a large download.

“Patch sizes may be larger than usual,” the Fortnite Status Twitter/X account tweeted. “We will update you when it is available to start installing.”

The influx of players during Saturday’s big live-event (which ran three times over the course of the day) led to a number of technical issues, causing Epic to bring down various game modes including Save The World in order to stabilize performance. At one point, Fortnite was down completely.

Chapter 5, Season 1 will launch as soon as the patch is complete, though it’s unclear when exactly that will be. Most new seasons launch early in the morning, often well before most people are up playing video games. This one might take longer due to the larger size of the patch. New Chapters, which come with brand new maps and a bunch of other big changes, typically have larger update sizes.

I will monitor the game’s status and update this post when it goes live. Get ready for a new map, crossovers with Family Guy, LEGO, Metal Gear Solid, and weapon mods, as well as improved movement, a new Battle Pass and much more. Stay tuned for more updates.

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