Fortnite, perhaps one of the world’s biggest, and most popular Battle Royale games was canceled last night during an in-game event called The End which has rendered the game entirely unplayable. Now, worldwide speculation occurs as everyone watches a swirling black hole either through the live stream or through the game itself.
Yesterday, the end ofFortnite’stenth season came about with a rather large bang. Literally.
Players were greeted to scenes of an asteroid crashing down to the world which subsequently created a black hole that began to suck everything in the universe towards it. Eventually, the island became consumed, leaving players lingering in space before they too were consumed, and then with a final flash, everything became nothing.
Suddenly, players were unable to play bothFortnite: Battle RoyaleandFortnite: Save the World.Instead, they were left watching a black hole with a blue light swirling from behind it, similar to the historic photo we saw earlier this year showing thefirst photo of a black hole.
The officialFortniteTwitter account has also deleted all of their previous tweets, leaving only a live stream video of the black hole running. The likes for the tweet sit at 312.5k at the time of writing. Thewebsite has also gone down, showing only the black hole stream.
The live stream then began to show numbers in the darkness, illuminated by the swirling blue light. These occurred occasionally throughout the stream and people began to speculate on what they mean. Memes have been created in droves as well as various videos showing kids getting annoyed at being unable to play the game. Twitter is basically a minefield of Fortnite content right now.
Theories of a date and time were discussed with one person showing a screenshot of a Chrome Developer Tools windowshowing the “end date”. Another found a screenshot of atext documentthat was apparently released by someFortniteleakers from some promotional material.
Elon Musk had also joined in with the events hype and tweeted “Haha” with a retweet to a satirical screenshot of an article he tweeted earlier this year, claiming that he boughtFortniteand then deleted it.
Ninja has also been active on Twitter talking about the event, and at one point last night he gave ahint in the form of a videoclaiming that he’s not even joking. The video showing nothing but darkness, with Ninja saying “Tacos” once. Comments all seem to believe this is related to “Taco Tuesdays” and are assuming that the nextFortnitechapter will begin on Tuesday.
In light of the event, PC players began Tweeting about being unable to login to the Epic Games Store Launcher to play other video games.Epic Games tweetedthat they were aware of the issue and instructed players that they can skip logging in to play games that don’t require players to be online. I also saw reports of Reddit experiencing downtime and it jokingly being linked to theFortniteevent.
Fortniteis, of course, down purposefully and not a result of a bug or crash. The event looks to be introducing Season 11 of the game, and as reported by other outlets, a new chapter appears to have beenleaked by Apple’s Italian iOS Store. The rumor is that a brand new map will be making its way to the title.
For the time being, players are left staring at a black hole, waiting for something to happen. If you’re unsure of howFortnitecame to be so popular, check out ourhistory of the game.
Fortniteis currently unavailable for PC, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, iOS, and Android.
