Epic Games Store Suffers Major Outage

Epic Games experienced a significant service disruption on November 26, 2025, preventing players from accessing the Epic Games Store, Fortnite, Rocket League, Fall Guys, and the Developer Portal due to widespread login failures.

The outage began at 17:54 UTC (12:54 PM ET / 9:54 AM PT) on November 26, when Epic Games first acknowledged the issue on its official status page. The company stated: "We're aware of players being unable to login to Epic Games Store, Fortnite, Rocket League, Fall Guys and Developer Portal. Our team is investigating the issue and we'll follow up once the issue has been resolved."

What Caused the Outage and Timeline

The disruption was traced to Epic Online Services (EOS), Epic's backend authentication system that handles user logins across all its platforms and games. When EOS login systems malfunction, the store cannot verify user identities, game ownership, or service access, resulting in cascading failures across the entire Epic ecosystem.

Players reported a variety of error messages during the outage, with many encountering CAPTCHA-related failures. Common error messages included "failed to initialize captcha," "invalid client," and "unable to start captcha." Some users who were already in-game were suddenly kicked out with messages stating "login expired or logged elsewhere," leading some to initially fear their accounts had been compromised.

The outage unfolded over several hours with Epic providing updates at 18:01 UTC, 18:14 UTC, and 18:56 UTC, all confirming ongoing investigation with no resolution. According to monitoring services, the outage lasted approximately one hour and four minutes, though some users reported intermittent issues persisting longer.

Impact on Players and Community Response

Thousands of PC gamers flocked to Down Detector and social media to report problems with the Epic Games launcher. The outage affected players across multiple platforms and prevented them from logging into the Epic Games Store, accessing their game libraries, launching games that depend on Epic Online Services, making purchases on the store, and playing online matches in Fortnite, Rocket League, and Fall Guys.

The timing was particularly unfortunate, coming just ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend in the United States when many players would have extended gaming time. It also coincided with Epic's weekly free game giveaway period, preventing users from claiming their free titles during the outage window.

Social media was flooded with frustrated players sharing their experiences. Many reported spending significant time restarting devices and troubleshooting their connections before realizing the issue was server-side. One user expressed relief upon learning about the widespread outage, stating they had been "restarting my devices multiple times" before discovering the problem wasn't isolated to their system.

This outage is part of a concerning pattern for Epic Games, which has experienced multiple service disruptions throughout 2025. The incident also occurred during a period of wider gaming industry instability, with some reports suggesting other platforms like Battle.net and PSN were experiencing concurrent issues, though Epic's problems appeared to be the most severe.

The outage highlights the vulnerability of modern gaming platforms that rely heavily on centralized authentication systems. Because most Epic titles depend on EOS to verify accounts, even locally installed games were unable to launch until services recovered, frustrating players who simply wanted to play offline content.

While Epic Games has not provided a detailed post-mortem explaining the root cause of the failure, services appeared to be restored by early evening UTC on November 26. The company has not indicated whether the issue stemmed from a cloud provider fault, DDoS attack, deployment error, or other technical problem.

Players are advised to monitor Epic's official status page at status.epicgames.com for any future disruptions. For those who missed claiming free games during the outage window, Epic typically refreshes its free game lineup on Wednesdays, giving players another opportunity to claim titles once services are fully stabilized.