The biggest game in the world was down for over 12 hours worldwide, but now it's back online

The biggest game in the world right now is "Fortnite," with tens of millions of people playing monthly.
The game, which is played entirely online, was offline from Wednesday night to Thursday afternoon.
Epic Games, the studio that makes "Fortnite," worked non-stop to get the massively popular game online again.
As of Thursday afternoon, the game was online again.

It's not just you: "Fortnite" was offline for everyone for nearly 24 hours.

More specifically, the wildly popular "Fortnite: Battle Royale" mode that pits 100 players against each other in a fight to the death was offline. The outage started on Wednesday night, according to Epic Games. An update on Thursday around 1 PM ET said that the game should be fixed "over the next couple of hours. It was back online by around 3PM ET.

Representatives for the North Carolina-based game studio behind "Fortnite" took to Reddit to explain what happened:

"We’re sorry for the ongoing extended instability. We had a critical failure with one of our account service databases. As a result, our login and matchmaking systems are unstable. Our team has been working through the night on fixes in order to bring the game fully back up. Right now we don’t know how long it will take, but we will update you hourly. Thanks for your patience while we work to resolve these issues."

What that meant for nearly 24 hours was you couldn't play "Fortnite: Battle Royale" on any of the many platforms it's available on, from PlayStation 4 to iPhone (and everything else).

Our attempt to access the game on a PlayStation 4 on Thursday morning was met with the following message:

If you've somehow managed to miss the "Fortnite" phenomenon thus far, you may be wondering what this is all about.

The free-to-play game is a third-person shooter in the "Battle Royale" genre — 100 unarmed players parachute to an island, scavenge for supplies, and attempt to survive. If you're the last one left, you win!

"Fortnite" has become such a phenomenon that celebrities like Drake have taken to playing it with major video game streamers. And thus, there are quite a few angry folks out there who'd like to get back into the game — somewhere in the realm of 45 million people are playing the game, though that number has assuredly grown since its recent launch on iPhone.

As of Thursday afternoon, the game was back online.

The Battle Bus once again o... @ Fortnite