Fortnite's Black Hole Is Over – Kotaku, Kotaku.com

After roughly a day and a half,Fortnite’s black hole is over. Despite the anticipation for a big event, the server simply went offline. There it is.

At around 4am Eastern, with thousands of people around the world staring atFortnite‘s swirling black hole, the game suddenly blinked to a loading screen, with a message reading “Fortniteservers are currently undergoing maintenance. Please try again later. ”The servers currently read as“ offline, ”presumably undergoing maintenance for the next season.

In a normal Fortniteseason, this is pretty standard : developer Epic takes the game offline between roughly 4 and 6am to update things. I’m not surprised to see there be downtime here, and I’m glad we’ll be getting the new season so soon. But after all the waiting and social media blackout surrounding the black hole, this feels a little anticlimactic to me. Was a big “black hole death” event inside us all along? I’m awake at four in the damn morning, so I’m going to say yes, because I need this.

Some folks on Twitter are saying the new cinematic trailer played for them in the lobby, but I was unable to access that, as pressing “relaunch” just took me out of the game, which is currently updating. Here’s what folks are seeing:

Following the game’s big end of season event,Fortniteturned from a game of weird characters and 10 – year-old teammates into a swirling black hole. It then, to the internet’s collective shock, stayed that way. Confused players joined forces to decode mysterious numbers, play a hidden minigame, entertain themselves with speculation, and spend more than 35 hours staring at what basically amounts to a screensaver.

At last, we are free from the hole, and we’ll be getting a new season ofFortnite. There have been hints of a new map, and a supposed leaked battle pass trailer shows possible new weapons, a new way to level up, and new things to do. We’ll see whatFortnite‘s new world looks like when the game comes back online, which for me is in 60%.

Update 4: 43 am –My update finished, but I’m just seeing “servers offline.” I’m making a second pot of coffee