Grand Theft Auto V free download: Fans flood Epic Games Store, website crashes

Epic Games recently teamed up with Rockstar Games to offer Grand Theft Auto V free on the Epic Games Store. GTA V being one of Rockstar Games’ most-coveted video-game franchises, fans flooded the platform to download the AAA title. However, the swell of demand caused the site to slow down and eventually crash.

After an outage of almost nine hours, the Epic Games Store appears to be back online, which means you should be able to claim your copy of GTA V for free. The Rockstar’s smash hit action-adventure video game will be available for free until May 21.

Every week Epic Games makes a ‘mystery game’ announcement that is made available without any charge on the store. The games are made available for PC and Mac users. This week, GTA V was revealed as the mystery game. However, when the time came for the deal to go live, the Epic Games Store went down.

We are currently experiencing high traffic on the Epic Games Store. We are aware that users may be encountering slow loading times, 500 errors, or launcher crashing at this time and we are actively working to scale. We'll provide an update as soon as we can.

— Epic Games Store (@EpicGames) May 14, 2020

The slowdown was attributed to high demand and Epic has since provided updates to resolve the issue. The crash appears to have lasted several hours and The Verge reported that other Epic platforms may have also been affected. Fortnite was experiencing issues with its launcher, while the mobile game Battle Breakers was also experiencing an issue.

Grand Theft Auto V is one of the most successful single-video games ever released. Rockstar has sold over 120 million copies of the game since its launch in 2013. Get your copy of GTA V for free here.