The visitor’s rocket didn’t just kill Fortnite’s map, it deleted the game entirely and now all we have left is a black hole and downtime.
Credit: Epic Games
Fortnite servers are still down following yesterday’s huge ‘The End’ live event.
During that event, the mysterious Visitor launched his rocket, which then plunged through the sky creating numerous rifts. It launched a bunch of smaller missiles which all converged and essentially swallowed up the comet hovering over Dusty Depot.
The point of this was to alter the comet’s trajectory. Apparently it was never meant to land on Dusty. Loot Lake was the real target. Moments later, the comet and all those missiles appeared in the sky, emerging from a new rift over Loot Lake and the orb that’s been hovering there since the end of Season 9.
Once the comet broke through the barrier over Loot Lake and made contact, the entire map was swallowed up–into the Vault. Then everything went black and we were left with nothing but a black hole.
That black hole remains this morning, as Epic continues to livestream the game’s absence. There are even secret, coded messages appearing in the stream. But servers remain down and there’s no official word as to when they’ll return.
There are currently two competing theories, however. The first is that the game will go live this afternoon. This is based on Chinese dataminers who have 4:05 pm ET as the start of Season 11.
Previously, it looked like Season 11 might not go live until Tuesday morning, based on code from the Fortnite website, but now that code is showing 4 am ET this coming Thursday, October 17th–the day of the week that traditionally marks the beginning of a season or a weekly challenge. That would be days worth of downtime and lost revenue, and seems incredibly unlikely.
Then again, this is Epic Games we’re talking about. They’ve made a boatload of money off of this game and they’re willing to take some risks. Keeping Fortnite offline for the better part of a week would certainly keep everyone talking and guessing and on their toes. It would be pretty surprising, no doubt, but I wouldn’t put it past them.
We’ll see. In the meantime, here’s the black hole stream. And here’s a song to pass the time:
