Epic's battle royale title Fortnite has smashed a brand new record for concurrent users but that has not been without its issues.

In a - admittedly, very technical - post on its blog, developer and publisher Epic Games said that 3.4m people playing Fortnite at once had in fact tanked the servers.

The long and the short of it, however, is that the server infrastructure the software firm has wasn't up to scratch to deal with that many players.

Moving forwards, the team is reworking how its infrastructure works, including work on making sure the servers or clients only call the backend when its necessary. Furthermore, Epic says it is going to be optimising how it stores matchmaking data and improving its own internal operation process for development and production.

"Problems that affect service availability are our primary focus above all else right now," the company wrote.

"We want you all to know we take these outages very seriously, conducting in-depth post-mortems on each incident to identify the root cause and decide on the best plan of action. The online team has been working diligently over the past month to keep up with the demand created by the rapid week-over-week growth of our user base."

It’s been an amazing and exhilarating experience to grow Fortnite from our previous peak of 60K concurrent players to 3.4M in just a few months, making it perhaps the biggest PC/console game in the world! All of this has been accomplished in just a few months by a small team of veteran online developers -- and we’d love to welcome a few more folks like yourself to join Epic Games on this journey."

Again, comparisons are being made with Playerunknown's Battlegrounds, but this is potentially not a fair line to draw; PUBG has a peak of 3.2m players, but it's a premium game and only on PC.

Fortnite's 3.4m is for a free-to-play title across PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. No doubt that's still impressive, but context is important.