Fortnite Blackout Crippled Twitch, Leaves Players Hanging

Yesterday, Epic Games did something rather unthinkable with Fortnite: it more or less deleted the entire game. During the in-game event to close out Season X, Fortnite's map was destroyed in a massive explosion, leaving players in the void of space and staring at only a black hole. For the moment, Fortnite as we know it doesn't exist, but that's all bound to change soon.

Epic's decision to destroy Fortnite's ever-changing map generated a ton of interest in the game, so much so that the number of players tuning into Twitch to watch the event as it happened ended up crashing the website. As the event was happening, streams failed to load entirely for many users, while other users couldn't connect to chat or couldn't view live channels.

Even now, some hours after the Fortnite Blackout, interest in the event is still high. The Fortnite Twitch and YouTube channels are running a continuous livestream of the black hole, and though it doesn't make for exciting content, at the time of this writing that stream still has around 66,000 viewers on Twitch and 22,000 viewers on YouTube. All of them are simply waiting to see something happen.

Indeed, at the moment it's impossible to find any official information about what's next. Fortnite's Twitter account has been scrubbed clean, save for one pinned tweet that links to the aforementioned livestream. The Fortnite website links only to the livestream as well, so we're being left in the dark – both figuratively and literally – for the time being.

There's no word on what's next, but many believe that we're about to begin "Fortnite Chapter 2." Last week, leaks suggested that Chapter 2 could, among other things, include a new map, and since the current map was just destroyed as millions of players watched, there seems to be something to those rumors. Hopefully we find out soon, but until Epic makes an announcement, we're left staring into the abyss.