Battle Royale: Fortnite hit by server outage

A lengthy server outage that prevented gamers playing Fortnite's Battle Royale mode has been resolved.

The title, which was developed by US-based Epic Games, began experiencing problems on Wednesday. It has more than 45 million players worldwide.

The issue meant that some gamers were unable to play the last-player-standing challenge on Xbox, PlayStation, PC or mobile.

A statement by Epic had blamed the glitch on a database fault.

"Login and game service issues have been resolved and we've returned to a healthy state," it announced shortly after 20:00 BST.

Soon after, it added that a related email notifications backlog had also been corrected.

Several of the game's fans had voiced their displeasure on social media during the near day-long outage.

But one expert said such glitches were not unusual.

"It's not ideal from their perspective because they have millions of players that want to play the game," said Piers Harding-Roll, head of games at analyst firm IHS Markit.

"But the most important thing is that people [were] given regular updates."

Fortnite launched last June as a paid game.

However, the Battle Royale mode - which pits 100 players against each other - is free to play.

It makes money by selling costumes and other cosmetic in-game items.

These generated more than $15m (£10.5m) on iOS alone over its first three weeks on Apple's mobile platform - which it joined on 15 March - according to one analytics firm.

Some parents have raised concerns about the amount of time their children are spending within Fortnite's cartoon-like fights.

However, one academic recently cautioned against describing the game as being "addictive".

Fortnite has been nominated for two prizes at Thursday evening's Bafta Games Awards.