Fortnite has broken NBN records, with its latest major content update completely blowing network usage records out of the water.
Brought to our attention by Aussie Broadband’s media relations adviser Alex Walker, and as originally reported on by CommsDay, the NBN network hit new usage records of 24Tbps (that’s terabits per second) on the evening of Fortnite’s Chapter 4 Season 2 update.
Fortnite handles content updates across several months with overarching themes – Chapter 4 Season 2’s theme goes in on cyberpunk set pieces, while previous themes have included Marvel superheroes and island-wide wars.
The update was released at 8pm on the evening of March 10, as reported by CommsDay, which is notably the busiest period for the Australia-wide broadband network. Depending on the device, the Fortnite patch was between 3GB and 15GB in size.
With the evening of the update putting a 24Tbps demand on the network, the early evening of March 26 was the second highest usage period recorded, at 19.9Tbps, again according to CommsDay.
This led to March being the highest usage month since November 2022.
“On Friday 10 March, NBN saw an all-time record of 24Tbps downstream traffic across the network, driven by a Fortnite update that was released across multiple devices,” NBN chief engineering officer John Parkin told Gizmodo Australia in a statement.
“NBN uses trends in traffic data to inform and guide what we do today to help us meet the digital needs of Australia now and into the future.”
Video game content updates are usually quite big – especially in the age of live service games, where users can expect big changes every three or so months. These changes typically come in the forms of new enemies, mechanics, maps, weapons, player cosmetics or game modes, and it’s something that the biggest games in the world at the moment (titles like Fortnite, Call of Duty, League of Legends, CS:GO and others) commit to.
The content update for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2022) that was rolled out on the evening of April 12, for example, weighs in at between 18GB and 37GB, depending on if you’re playing on PC, PS5 or Xbox Series X|S.
Anyway, if your internet was noticeably slow on the evening of March 10, sorry about that. It’s because people across Australia, including myself, were downloading a Fortnite update. *dabs*