After a more than eight-hour outage, the Epic Games Store appears to finally be back online, meaning you should finally be able to claim Rockstar’s smash hit Grand Theft Auto V download for free until May 21st.
The Epic Games Store had been counting down to the launch of an unnamed free title at 11AM ET today, and we learned last night that game would be GTA 5, thanks to an early tweet posted by Epic Games’ official Twitter account. However, when the time came for the deal for the game to go live, the Epic Games Store went down, presumably as people tried to refresh the site to claim the free title.
Epic acknowledged the outage in an 11:05AM ET tweet, and in a 12:58PM ET tweet the company said the store was still experiencing issues:
We are currently experiencing high traffic on the Epic Games Store.
We are aware that users may be encountering slow loading times, 500 errors, or launcher crashing at this time and we are actively working to scale. We’ll provide an update as soon as we can.
The heavy traffic to the store may have affected other Epic services as well, as an official Fortnite Twitter account said Epic was “investigating issues” on PC and Mac and later said there were also issues on iOS and Android. Epic’s Battle Breakers mobile game was also experiencing issues during the day. However, according to Epic’s status page, both Fortnite and Battle Breakers are now fully operational again.
Epic is letting you claim the Premium Edition of GTA 5 download, which includes “the complete GTA V story, Grand Theft Auto Online and all existing gameplay upgrades and content,” according to the studio, as well as the Criminal Enterprise Starter Pack, which gives you additional content and $1,000,000 bonus cash for GTA Online.
Before snagging your copy, you should know that Epic is now requiring people have two-factor authentication turned on to claim free games. If you need a guide on how to turn on two-factor authentication for your account, Epic has one you can follow here.
Epic has given away dozens of free titles since launching its PC store in December 2018, and the company said in January it plans to continue to give away free games through 2020.
