Photo Courtesy of Fortnite and Time Magazine
"For around 36 hours, Fortnite — one of the most popular video games in the world — was literally a black hole.
At the end of a long-teased season finale, the mysterious rift opened in the game’s world Sunday night, sucking in players, the map, and even the menu. Gamers who logged in were treated to a view of the celestial phenomenon brimming in the distance. Mysterious numbers appeared. Music played in the background. If players entered a code, they could enjoy a simple mini-game. During the blackout, developer Epic Games’ Twitter account, Twitch stream and public relations team all went dark.
While Fortnite’s 250 million-plus players scrambled to figure out what was going on, studio Epic Games did server maintenance as it prepared to switch everything over to a new map and launch new features. This in itself is unremarkable; online games go down for hours at a time for routine maintenance all the time. What is remarkable is that Epic Games managed to disguise such a commonplace event as a big moment, simultaneously keeping players happy and generating a massive amount of press attention for a game that, while plenty popular, has certainly moved past its “phenomenon” stage."
Read more about how a routine server outage became a media phenomenon at Time magazine.