Fortnite May Tell You That You’re Currently Banned During Maintenance

Consider yourself an ethical player and haven’t done anything to get yourself banned in Fortnite, but recently gotten an error that tells you that you are currently banned from the game? Don’t worry just yet — you may be getting the notification without an actual ban.

The Winter update for the game’s Battle Royale mode is finally upon us, but during the game’s December 14th maintenance, a number of players were met with an error message stating they were banned from the game for an indeterminate amount of time. If you’re here, you’re probably in the same boat.

The good news is that you are probably not currently banned from Fortnite, unless you really have been less than pleasant. It’s more likely that you saw this notification in error, along with a handful of other players who tried to log in during maintenance hours. It seems there’s an issue with Epic’s error messages, which is causing false ban notifications (but not actual bans).

Players can receive the ban notification during maintenance hours, whether they are truly banned or not — very annoying for a casual Fortnite player, but downright terrifying for a dedicated fan who has spent time and money on the game.

Epic Games has come out on the game’s subreddit and stated they are going to audit their error messages to prevent this in the future. It’s unfortunate so many players got a scare yesterday, but hopefully this means we won’t be seeing false ban notifications in Fortnite.

Of course, none of this applies if you have actually done something that merits a real ban. In those cases, you need to take it up with Epic Games support. But those with squeaky clean gameplay records can breathe a sigh of relief this patch and the next if they get the banned message in error again.