Some ISPs Seeing Fortnite Consuming 50% Of Their Network Traffic, From Today’s Update

Season 7 of Epic Games Fortnite kicked off today on PS4, Xbox One, PC and the Nintendo Switch and multiple ISPs I have spoken to have said it’s made up some of the largest percentage of traffic they have ever seen on their network. A few ISPs reported Fortnite accounted for more than 50% of their inbound internet traffic (peering/transit/CDN/caching) at peak today, with one telling me it was as high as 62% of their traffic.

Microsoft is delivering a lot of the traffic themselves from their own network, but I also see some coming from CenturyLink, Limelight Networks and I know additional third-party CDNs are also involved. While the volume of bits is high, the price point the CDNs are getting paid is very low, and it’s downloads, not streaming, so it’s rock-bottom pricing. Some CDNs even passed on doing the delivery due to the low price point.

In addition to Microsoft handling much of the delivery themselves, ISPs that took advantage of  Microsoft’s free virtual cache software are managing a lot of the downloads themselves. So far, I haven’t heard of any problems with the update on a network level, just that it’s a lot of traffic.