Is Fortnite down right now? "Client is not compatible" error plagues servers worldwide (February 16, 2023)

Fortnite appears to currently be giving players major trouble right now. The Epic Games status website seems to indicate that there's nothing wrong with the game's servers, but reports of outages have spiked recently.

With the debut of the Most Wanted event and all that it brings, a lot of people want to play Fortnite right now. Unfortunately, many of them are being told that the title's "client is not compatible with the currently deployed server." But does this mean that Fortnite is unplayable at the moment?

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Fortnite "client is not compatible" error ruining the day for players

One of the best ways to find out if the game's (or any title or site) servers are down or not is to visit Down Detector. This site reports all outages and has seen a major spike recently, which suggests that the game really is unplayable right now.

Evidently, nearly one thousand players have come to the site to report server outages in just the last hour or so. It's also worth noting that no similar problem had presented itself priorly.

There are a lot of reported outages (Image via Down Detector)

Fortnite Status was just made aware of the client-server compatibility issue and informed the community that the developers were looking into the issue. With such widespread outages, Epic is working fast on finding a solution to get everyone back online as soon as possible.

Many gamers are experiencing severe problems when trying to play Fortnite, including server crashes and more. Such issues have become commonplace recently, and they seem to be affecting especially those with weaker internet connections for the most part.

In fact, whoever has the strongest connection in a team party will begin loading into a game, but the rest will get booted from the squad. Issues like this one are impossible to work around, so restarting your console or internet may not work.

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When will the servers come back online?

As mentioned earlier, Epic Games is now aware of the server-client compatibility issue. The developers likely have got a team working at the moment to fix it. However, whether an immediate fix will be implemented is hard to tell.

Fortnite Status' post only said the developers would provide an update when the problem was fixed and offered no information as to when that could be. Issues like this can be tough to root out, so it may be a while before a fix appears.

That said, gamers can rest assured that Epic is working to fix it. If the servers are down for a long time, the developers will likely give players a reward for their patience and offer an apology for things going wrong in the first place.