Did Fortnite shut down? Gamers left staring at black hole ahead of season 11 launch
October 14, 2019
After being hit by a load of rockets and meteor, Fortnite has reportedly shut down and is now displaying a black hole.
The game that hosts over 250 million players worldwide and made $2.4 billion in revenue last year has seemingly shut down leaving the players in shock, which was further exacerbated when the game's official Twitter account tweeted: "This is The End."
Interestingly, however, Fortnite's official Twitter account has also been wiped clean of all previous tweets including the 'This is The End' tweet. It now only shows this:
The online shooter game's creator, Epic Games, had been teasing "The End" — an in-game event to end the 10th season of the game. But fans had not expected a literal interpretation of the event, as the game went dark on Sunday, leaving players confused as they stared at a black hole ahead of an expected launch of Fortnite's next season.
The third version of the game, Fortnite Battle Royale, is a free-to-play shooter-survival battle game, wherein players from around the world can join online and fight to be the last person standing.
Fortnite's third version was a huge success for Epic Games, pulling more than 125 million players in under a year of its initial September 2017 release and becoming a cultural phenomenon.
One of the most widely-played video games, Fortnite is especially popular with teens and some 50,000 gamers were still actively watching the black hole live-stream on YouTube four hours after the game had gone down.
Another 100,000 were watching on Twitch.
Gaming consultant Rod Breslau estimated that millions of gamers had tuned in. He called Sunday's black hole explosion and outage "the most watched gaming event in history," with millions of viewers on Twitch and YouTube.
"Epic Games are geniuses," Breslau said.
Following the outage, gamers also complained about being unable to log in to play any other games from Epic Games either. The company confirmed on Twitter that its game launcher was down but said shortly afterwards that it had returned to normalcy.
Is Fortnite going to come back?
Fortnite generates a huge revenue for Epic Games and, therefore, it would be unusual for the developers to throw it all away. The game has started to offer hints but it’s not clear as to what they mean exactly.
Occasionally, numbers come out of the black hole and players found that the first of those numbers, when put into Google Maps, sent players to a huge gathering of crustaceans on a beach — that is, a crab rave.
No official statement has released by Epic games, the developers, regarding the matter.
CNN reported that a "statement from PlayStation on Twitter assured players that the digital money and 'inventory' they have on the game would not be lost as a result of the blackout".
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