Courtesy Epic Games | Facebook
The wildly popular game Fortnite is no longer playable. Parents everywhere know it as a game that sucks their children into a virtual black hole, but this time, that’s exactly what happened.
The battle royale shooter game ended its tenth season with a bang Sunday, when players joined, expecting an impressive special in-game live event that game developer Epic has been known for.
Epic Games had been hyping the event called “The End” that began yesterday at 12 pm MST. Promotions showed many of the iconic characters gathered and waving at a departing Battle Bus with the ominous caption: “This is the End.” As players loaded into the map, that’s what appears to have happened.
At noon Sunday, a rocket on the island where Fortnite takes place took off and flew around the map, then crashed near the middle of the island, creating a black hole that engulfed the map and all the players. Now, that black hole appears to be all that’s left.
Almost 24 hours after everything disappeared, there are still well over 50,000 people currently watching the mysterious black hole spin across social media.
As soon as the event ended, there was a literal blackout of Fornite’s social media accounts. The game’s Twitter, Instagram and Facebook pages all blacked out their profile pictures and have been silent since the event.
Epic went so far as to even delete all tweets on their official Twitter page except for a live stream of the black hole.
It is unclear how long Fortnight will be down, but some online are speculating that Epic has been able to weave planned server downtime and maintenance into an impressive marketing strategy.
“Fortnite Season 10 is coming to an end, and all of this is hype for Season 11,” Rod Breslau, an esports and gaming consultant told CNN Business. “Instead of just the standard update approach that Epic does for Fortnite … which is going down for a few hours to apply an update, Epic has created an entire marketing and social media campaign, along with a narrative story around it.”
Breslau called Sunday’s Fortnite black hole explosion and subsequent outage “the most-watched gaming event in history,” with millions of viewers on Twitch and YouTube.