On Tuesday, 15 July 2025, Fortnite players around the world, including many in South Africa, experienced major connectivity problems that rendered the popular online game unplayable for several hours.
‘Fortnite’ goes down on Tuesday, 15 July 2025: Here’s the latest
The disruptions began early in the morning and coincided with the game’s scheduled update rollout.
By 07:00 CST (14:00 SAST), at least 380 players had reported server connection issues to Downdetector, a platform that collects user-submitted outage data.
The most affected function was server connectivity, with 90% of the complaints pointing to problems connecting to Fortnite’s servers.
Smaller portions reported issues with logging in (7%) and gameplay functionality (3%).
The problems were linked to Fortnite’s version 36.20 update, which started at 03:00 CST (10:00 SAST).
Epic Games, the company behind Fortnite, confirmed that the update was planned and part of routine maintenance. This kind of maintenance usually takes between two and four hours to complete.
“The v36.20 update brings new weapons and items like the Unstable Thunderclap DMR, Lightrider’s Surf Cube, and the Unstable Bounce Grenade,” said Epic Games in a public statement.
The company also introduced new creative elements such as Utopia City-themed Prefabs and Galleries, along with various other performance improvements and fixes.
However, problems were not isolated to Tuesday morning. Around 12 hours before the scheduled update, Fortnite experienced separate issues affecting its matchmaking feature—the part of the system that pairs players together for games.
At its peak just before 15:30 CST (22:30 SAST) on Monday, 14 July 2025, 560 users reported matchmaking problems.
Epic Games acknowledged the situation at 15:32 CST (22:32 SAST). and issued a follow-up at 16:45 CST (23:45 SAST). confirming the issue had been resolved.
In South Africa, the first reports of problems appeared at around 22:00 on Monday. These complaints sharply increased from around 09:30 on Tuesday, according to Downdetector.
Although these types of outages are expected during scheduled updates, many users voiced frustration on social media about not being able to access the game during peak gaming hours.
Epic Games has not reported any unexpected complications with the update, and servers were expected to be back online within the typical maintenance window.
