In what’s being called one of the most-watched gaming events in the west ever, Epic Games trolled Fortnite players hard yesterday afternoon by taking the game offline at the conclusion of season 10 – literally pushing the whole game past the event horizon of a black hole and letting the game and streams sit right there displaying the void of space. We’ll stop short here of listing off other games we’d like to sent into a black hole and instead point out that Epic went dark on its social media outlets too (including, bizarrely, Trello) in one epic-sized stunt covered even by mainstream media outlets like CNN, and nobody outside of the studio really has any clue how long it’s going to go on until it’s back. But damn does it have everyone talking. And also freaking out because they can’t get their Fortnite fix, that too.
Course, it wasn’t all planned; the Epic Games Store suffered an outage right around the same time too.
As Polygon’s pointed out, logging into Fortnite currently shows players the same black hole shown on the livestream. But at one point, the numbers 11, 146, 15, and 62 popped up within the blackness. Among the more amusing theories is that they’re just more trolling: inputting those coords into Google Maps brings up an image of a crab swarm, probably referring to this video. Subsequent numbers – 87, 14, 106, 2, and 150 – are leading folks down yet another rabbit hole.
https://youtu.be/huDgBRqbMuc
THERE IS OVER SIX MILLION (!!) CONCURRENT VIEWERS FOR THE FORTNITE 'THE END' EVENT ACROSS TWITCH AND YOUTUBE INCLUDING OVER 4 MILLION ALONE (!!) ON YOUTUBE
incredible pic.twitter.com/nLYUu3qhp6
— Rod Breslau (@Slasher) October 13, 2019
