The Epic Games Store was down for hours as everyone tried to get GTA V for free

After a more than eight-hour outage, the Epic Games Store appears to finally be back online, meaning you should finally be able to claim Rockstar’s smash hit Grand Theft Auto V for free until May 21st.

The Epic Games Store had been counting down to the launch of an unnamed free title at 11AM ET today, and we learned last night that game would be GTA V, thanks to an early tweet posted by Epic Games’ official Twitter account. However, when the time came for the deal for the game to go live, the Epic Games Store went down, presumably as people tried to refresh the site to claim the free title.

Epic acknowledged the outage in an 11:05AM ET tweet, and in a 12:58PM ET tweet the company said the store was still experiencing issues:

Continue reading…