The Epic Games Store website experienced over eight hours of downtime after launching the free GTA 5 giveaway. Reports claim that this may have caused server issues for many of its games and services.
It would seem like the Epic Games Store drowned in the massive waves of traffic from May 14’s fiasco after it unleashed Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto 5 as a limited free-to-keep game title.
Rumors have been circulating the past weeks that the fifth installment of GTA was next in line on Epic Games’ free title giveaway roster. Avid followers were quick to catch the tweet slip up two days before the release.
A Twitter ad was posted by the Epic Games Store on May 12 confirming the free GTA V rumors. The post was immediately deleted, but not fast enough for one of its followers to get a video screen capture of the video ad.
Tweet ad is deleted, so here you go pic.twitter.com/3oja0C3418
— Wario64 (@Wario64) May 14, 2020
Website crashes with series of 500 error codes
The accidental tweet only added to the already overwhelming hype for the next Epic Games Store Free Game release. As a result, the San Francisco-based game developer and publisher’s online store server totally crashed.
Reports claim that everyone who was patiently waiting for the countdown timer to hit zero experienced all kinds of 500 error codes. Others, on the other hand—after performing a few reload attempts—got the website up but with languages different from theirs.
The Epic Game Store posted updates on its Twitter account—officially announcing that the website crash was caused by the massive surge of traffic. According to its status page, the issue gravely impacted the “Launcher logins and purchases.”
We've deployed updates to provide resolution for these issues, and most users should be able to access the Epic Games Store and Launcher at this time. We'll continue to monitor traffic and provide updates if further issues are encountered. Thank you for your continued patience!
— Epic Games Store (@EpicGames) May 15, 2020
After more than eight hours of downtime, the company finally provided an update that they’ve resolved the problem and will continue monitoring the traffic to counter any future issues.
This massive server fiasco only proves that despite being released almost 7 years ago, the Grand Theft Auto franchise remained a favorable classic with a very active and continuously growing community base.
Nevertheless, Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto 5 will still be up for grabs until May 21.
Fortnite server gets affected
Although there hasn’t been any official announcement linking the servers’ issues together, Forbes noted that Fortnite’s servers for all platforms—PC, Mac, Android, and iOS, were experiencing some server problems as well.
We're aware that logins and purchases are additionally impacted on iOS and Android.
We're actively working to resolve login and purchasing issues on all affected platforms and will continue to keep you updated.
— Fortnite Status (@FortniteStatus) May 14, 2020
The Verge then highlights that the same issue happened to Epic Games’ Battle Breakers at the same time frame.
Also, other account holders of Epic Games were experiencing MD-0011 errors—download errors—in some other titles late last night, May 15. Nevertheless, the issue was immediately resolved.
As of this writing, it would appear that everything is in order, with the website, other online services, and the mentioned games are finally operational.
Featured image courtesy of Rockstar Games