Heya Folks,

Today we’re excited to launch the Fortnite Middle East server region! 

TL;DR - We expect a range of ping improvements from 20-50% for many players across the southern Middle East (i.e. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain), as well as India.

What to expect today?

Our initial focus is on the Arabian Peninsula, where players in the region experience the highest ping. We expect most players in the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia to see immediate improvements, as well as groups of players in other surrounding countries (depending on the city and ISP of choice). We’re going to continue improving performance as we roll out networking paths to additional providers.

In order to launch the new Middle East region, we’ve had to take the current SEA subregion servers offline. This is because removing the players who have better performance to the Middle East region does not leave sufficient population to support healthy matchmaking. For the majority of players who played on the SEA servers from the Middle East and India, you should expect to see a reduction in ping. There will be some players across other parts of Southeast Asia that experience an increase in ping. Please let us know how this changes your Fortnite experience as we continue making improvements 

The Middle East region is hosted by our cloud computing partners in Mumbai, India. We chose Mumbai in order to balance providing the best possible experience for players in the Middle East with preserving the experience of those who were previously utilizing the SEA region servers. While there are other datacenter options available, they don’t currently have the needed network paths to reach the majority of players in the region. 

Why did it take so long?

In order to make this happen, we had to work with some of the world's largest cloud infrastructure companies to provide an awesome experience for players in the Middle East. Beyond servers, we also need low latency network connectivity to players. This has been a particular challenge in this part of the world given the number of countries, network providers, and varying levels of interconnection between them.

In order to solve the networking challenge, we worked with a new partner to build out an optimized network to carry game traffic back to our cloud infrastructure in places where the existing networks did not meet our performance targets. This network is deployed on hardware running in data centers across the region with network connectivity to major end user ISPs and more than a half dozen terrestrial and subsea international private leased network circuits back to India.

What’s next?

We have more network improvements in progress and we’ll continue to look for options to expand our network reach to improve the experience for players everywhere. 

Keep your eyes peeled!