Fortnite is a behemoth of the gaming world, with several mega updates each year drawing huge attention. These updates, ranging from 10GB to over 50GB of downloaded data per user, release at the same time across the globe, posing a mammoth challenge for internet providers with the sheer strain the event places on networks.

In March, Fortnite’s ‘29 Ch5S2’ update presented another challenge for our network engineers. See how we tackled it below.

Into the storm

Update 29 Ch5S2 released at 8pm AEDT on Friday 8 March, with file sizes of 38GB for PC players and 10GB-25GB for console players.

At this point, each of the last 3 Fortnite updates had caused historic peaks in usage across our network. 29 Ch5S2 saw a peak of 3.76 Terabits per second (Tbps), or 3.76 trillion bits per second. To get a sense of scale, these updates broke the previous (non-Fortnite related) record by a huge 32%.

Unsurprisingly, these updates often caused congestion for users across ISPs in Australia. Luckily, our network team has been working to reduce the impact of each update, learning and iterating on our improvements, and we’re seeing some big strides.

Fortifying our network

We found out 29 Ch5S2 was coming a couple weeks beforehand and immediately reached out to our Content Delivery Network (CDN) partners, including Fastly. CDNs like Fastly manage servers that store large files from international services. The key here is that they have servers across Australia (and likely one near you) making it easier and faster for you to use or download those files. Hence the great name Fastly.

In the lead up to the Fortnite drop, we reached out to the awesome folks at Fastly to ensure that traffic from Epic Games flowed to their CDN smoothly, avoiding a bottleneck of data flowing through international links.

Our work paid off. March’s update had minimal traffic from international links, with most of the data coming from domestic CDNs.

While the update came through several CDNs, Fastly absorbed the most traffic, with a 5422% increase. As a result, our connections to Fastly in Queensland, Victoria, and New South Wales reached the Peak Information Rate (PIR).

When this happened, Fastly knew to spread out the traffic to alternate, available pathways to try and mitigate congestion. This was mostly successful – although one backup port reached capacity with 198 Gigabits per second (Gbps) of traffic, mostly coming from Victoria.

All in all, at least one of our Network-to-Network Interfaces (NNIs) to NBN experienced congestion at 52 of 121 of NBN’s Points of Interconnect (POIs).

Each update has been an improvement on the last. Unlike previous updates, 29 Ch5S2 didn’t require engineers to reroute traffic internationally or inter-capitally at all. This meant customers were still able to send and receive data from state to state – and download from local servers – with Fortnite traffic causing less congestion on the network.

The final circle

Scaling capacity is a priority as we move into a world where the average household’s download requirements are quickly growing. While this is a challenge, we’re continuing to shore up our network in a few ways.

• We’ve worked closely with Fastly to increase our capacity in the connections to their servers, so they can support more traffic before needing to redistribute it.

• To prevent future congestion to POIs, we’re in the process of moving to 100 gigabit NNIs.

• On top of that, we’ve been upgrading our international transit ports, increasing their capacity so that our network is well positioned to handle future updates and other large data transfer events.

That said, we’re never going to stop upgrading and futureproofing our network, as Australia’s need for fast, reliable internet continues to grow.

If you’d like to keep up with our Networking team, follow us on X @asn4764!