Epic apologises for Fortnite downtime with free goodies

You might have noticed Fortnite has had a rough 24 hours or so. Whether you're big into the hottest game on earth yourself, or your kids rushed home from school only to find their favourite video game didn't work, millions were left stranded yesterday, cast adrift and perplexed at the prospect of a Fortnite-less evening.

Epic, developer of the game, noticed the downtime, too. In a blog post, the studio apologised for Fortnite being offline pretty much all of yesterday. "We're sorry. We know how frustrating this has been," the developer said.

"We messed up here," Epic continued, before revealing free goodies offered "as thanks for being awesome and patient".

So, Battle Royale players this weekend get a Back Bling gift you can pick up in the store for free. Save the World players this weekend get a Troll Stash Llama in the loot tab for free.

There's more: next week Epic will give a pack of Battle Stars to Battle Royale players and Seasonal Gold to Save the World players. This will require brief additional downtime, Epic warned, "so we will be including it as a part of our planned update next week."

What went wrong yesterday, then? Epic said it'll publish a detailed postmortem of this week's issues as well as detail what it's doing to prevent a repeat later next week.