This does not just happen when testing a private playtest maps; it happens on all instances of an Island, whether private or public.
It is extremely widespread, meaning people cannot join into the Island more than 80% of the time.
It is seemingly mostly happening when trying to join an in-progress Island.
It may or may not be related, but as of this update, on Nintendo Switch, loading into a UEFN edit session takes FOREVER, and once it finally does, it crashes the game with no specific error code.
I’ve not yet figured out which is true, but either one of the two (or both) possibilities are happening:
Joining an in-progress game in general only works about 20% of the time
OR
Joining an in-progress game, then leaving it, and then trying once again to rejoin it, will cause the issue to occur.
Key note: it does not matter how many times you restart your game, you will still be unable to queue into that specific lobby. For that reason, this issue is more noticeable on smaller games, such as the island code: 8025-5133-5479
From what I’ve noticed, if you’ve never played that lobby, you still have a very small chance of being able to load in; but if you HAVE played that lobby, 99% of the time, you WILL NOT be able to load in.
Additional related issues:
On Islands where this issue is occurring, Verse code and devices are also not consistently working.
Players leaving the server of affected Islands may potentially be causing the above issue to happen.
If you do manage to load in, your HUD may not load at all, and in the case where that happens, opening text chat will softlock your game.
Something to note:
This issue has a small potential to be related to this bug report: [URGENT] Island passing "MATCHMAKING ERROR #1" when trying to queue. - #9 by RMCFN , as the issue in that bug report is no longer happening as of this update - it may be worth checking if all the Islands affected by this issue are Islands converted from Creative 1.0 to UEFN.
For clarification, this verycritical issue is as follows: the player gets stuck on an infinite loading screen for ~10 minutes, then either crashes, or is sent back to the lobby.
Not only converted islands. I’ve just tested the “reconnect to the same session” scenario for the live code of my island College RP (it’s a non-converted UEFN island). I’m not able to join back, and have been stuck on the connecting screen for the last 10 minutes.
Its incredibly frustrating that more and more players are complaining and nothing can be done about it. This critical bug has been around for four days now cant you at least give us an update on the status please? @Flak
Also happening on my islands, this is extremely gamebreaking.
I think it is caused when a player joins a game for the first time, than leaves and at a later point tries to reconnct to the same game getting stuck in an endless loading screen.
same issue, even public map. This affects the core gameplay experience, especially causing critical damage to replayability. our player says “the most annoying bug ever“. What’s the status of the investigation right now?
Epic Games’ offices will be on winter break from December 20, 2025 and reopening January 5, 2026. During this time, Support will be unavailable.
Any support requests submitted during this time period through the Contact Support form will be reviewed after the break.
So not long to wait (3 days, some server problems have been fixed and new ones like
Android FN Menu → “Return to Lobby” after just entering Island resulting in an app crash and restart of EPGL app restarting Android FN on ALL islands. Then Server login failure crash etc….
There are lots of other threads, but none have 57 Votes! like this one
That’s because this one is literally a map killer and crashes fortnite… it is a really really big deal for all of us that work to make money from this ecosystem. 57 votes actually seems low for the severity of this bug.
Thank you!! So glad to know it’s finally being worked on
I would like to bring up, though, that many of us spent money to be in the sponsored row the past few weeks whilst this has been an issue, preventing people from consistently joining our games, damaging our metrics, and wasting our money. The clicks-to-plays ratio + CTR is quite disproportionate (in fact, from my own metrics, cut in half) compared to before the update because of this. It’s also severely damaged session length metrics, due to the inability to rejoin a session.
Obviously I’m not asking for handouts, but it would be nice to know that the team is aware of how badly this affected creators and their games the past 3 weeks, and will take steps going forward to ensure that something like this isn’t a common occurrence. It’s a very serious issue that caused a lot of problems, especially for smaller games with fewer active lobbies, and this is particularly true for games that were launched or revived during this period.
For example, it completely destroyed the re-launch of my game that I spent the entirety of 2025 working on, which was already previously killed outside of my control due to discover issues and broken devices that persisted for over a year when UEFN first released.
I fully understand that the team was on break, so it’s really just a case of unfortunate timing, and I can’t blame them for not being around to fix it - Epic’s company-wide winter break is much deserved, and I would never want the team to feel at fault for something like this happening when they’re not around. But, with that said, it did cause serious problems nonetheless that we as creators couldn’t do anything to alleviate, which is just another item to the pile of things that have been making creators less and less enchanted with this ecosystem, so I do feel we need some reassurance that the team will make moves to ensure things like this happen less often, and if they do, that there will eventually be systems in place to resolve them as quick as possible.