According to Fortnite's official Twitter account (opens in new tab), Fortnite's servers are down for extended maintenance on Monday, October 3.

The Battle Royale server outage is intentional and is in preparation for the next update, update 22.10. However, things are not going as planned. The maintenance downtime was scheduled to begin at 4 a.m. EST on October 4. Instead, it began nearly 12 hours earlier, around 5 p.m. EST.

"Due to an issue, we are going into downtime early," Fortnite Status tweeted. 'Update 22.10 will be released tomorrow, October 4.'

Epic did not provide an estimate of how long Fortnite will be offline, but said it will let players know when the downtime ends. An update is still scheduled for Tuesday, so maintenance could last until at least midnight EST, or even through the originally scheduled period.

Normally, Fortnite server maintenance is expected to last 2-4 hours, but major updates may require longer downtime; it is unclear why Epic has begun this downtime earlier than planned. Servers should be back online on Tuesday, October 4.