Why does Fortnite say “Waiting in Queue”?

Fortnite Chapter 3 Season 2 has just begun, and players are trying to log in to explore all the changes that have been made to the game. The reason for this is pretty simple. Epic Games has decided to implement a queue system after the servers came back online.

We imagine that this was done to try and alleviate a lot of the issues that games can have when they come back online after significant updates. Recent Fortnite updates have struggled with issues like lag, rubber banding, and crashing after coming back from a major update, such as a seasonal change. The queue is designed to control how fast the servers need to scale up to ensure that as few issues as possible will impact players.

Queue times can vary, depending on the time of day and how many people are trying to log on. The worst that we have personally witnessed was around 90 minutes or so. Worse, when you are finally logging in, that can fail, and you need to join the queue all over again, waiting another hour or so to get in.