A special event that marked the end of Fortnite's tenth season has plunged players into a black hole.
Players logged in on Sunday to take part in an event called “The End” as the game prepares to launch its next version. But around 2 p.m. ET, a rocket on the island where Fortnite has created the game’s landscape “dragged” all players into a black hole, leaving only a dark screen and a spinning black hole. Of course, there was no way for users to continue playing.
Fortnite is one of the most widely played video games, especially popular with teenagers. Even four hours after the game ended, about 50,000 people were still actively watching the live stream of the game's black hole on YouTube, another 100,000 were watching it on Twitch.
Games like Fortnite occasionally go down for server maintenance, usually frustrating users. But for the most part, Fortnite is known for its ever-changing updates, so this is probably something to consider. It's unclear how long the outage will last. Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, has not commented on the matter.
The blackout has led some Twitter to speculate that Epic Games has indeed brought the end of the game. But most believe it is a strategy to build user excitement about the next season of Fortnite, following user interest in the game in recent months.
"This year, Season 10 is coming to an end, and all of this is advertising for Season 11," Breslau told CNN Business. "Instead of the typical update approach that Epic takes for Fortnite ... they created an entire marketing and social media, along with a story around it."
Breslau called Sunday's black hole explosion and subsequent outage "the most entertaining gaming event in history," with millions of viewers on Twitch and YouTube. "Epic Games did something genius," he said.
A statement from PlayStation on Twitter assured players that their digital currency and in-game “stock” will not be lost due to the outage. Following the Fortnite outage, some users also complained that they could no longer log in to play other Epic games. The company confirmed on Twitter that it was experiencing some issues, but said shortly after that everything was back to normal.
