FORTNITE is offline after a period of downtime that lets Epic Games roll out the new v4.5 update patch, affecting players in the UK and all around the world.

The hit battle royale game stopped working at 9.06am UK time on Wednesday, June 27 – leaving players rather bored and confused.

Fortnite is a battle royale game where up to 100 players are dropped on to an island to fight in a last-person-standing death match.

On Wednesday morning, the hugely popular game went down for players around the world.

In a tweet last night, Epic Games confirmed the outage.

It wrote: "Play in the v4.5 update tomorrow, June 27. Be the first to get your boots on the ground!

"Downtime begins at 4am Eastern Time (0800 GMT)."

When will Fortnite come back online?

Fortnite regularly goes down for maintenance and updates.

If it's an emergency maintenance outage, the game can be off for an entire day or more.

That's because developers are scrambling to work out what's gone wrong – and more importantly, how to fix it.

But the most common reason why Fortnite goes down is for a major update.

Epic Games has to take Fortnite offline to roll out big changes – like adding new weapons, features or game modes.

When this happens, Fortnite is typically only down for a few hours, and Epic Games generally announces when it's back online.