PA/Epic GamesElon Musk has hinted he could’ve been behind the Fortnite blackout in a cryptic tweet.
Since Sunday (October 13) evening, fans of the video game have left unable to play the game, which has seemingly gone down, leaving just a strange ‘black hole’ on screens.
Although a likely summation is the outage was in preparation for Fortnite: Chapter 2, Musk appears to have suggested he could’ve been responsible.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 13, 2019
He tweeted out a fake news article dating back to 2018, which claimed the Tesla and SpaceX CEO had bought and deleted Fortnite to ‘save these kids of eternal virginity’.
At the time it was written, Musk shared a screenshot, writing, ‘had to be done ur welcome’. Now, he’s shared the faux article once more, simply writing ‘haha’.
His self-retweet alone has since garnered more than 46,000 retweets and more than 230,000 likes at the time of writing.
Fortunately, we’re *almost* certain his tweet was written in jest, and many of his responses were just as amusing.
Epic GamesA Fortnite news account replied saying ‘God damn it, Elon,’ while a professional player – yep, you can be a professional Fortnite player – wrote: ‘Alright fine you win this time, but you have to hire all of the pro players that are now jobless.’
Epic Games, the developer behind Fortnite, has even deleted all of the tweets from the official Fortnite twitter account, leaving just one tweet showing a live stream of a black hole.
This, of course, coincides with the black hole that appeared on players’ screens all over the world over the weekend when the server seemingly ‘crashed’.
Fortunately, PlayStation has confirmed that any purchases made in the game are safe during the outage. Phew, World War 3 has been averted.
Epic GamesAt the time of writing, players have still been unable to access the online game, with one dataminer suggesting it could potentially be down until Thursday morning.
As per Metro, respected dataminer Lucas7yoshi found references in the Fortnite website’s code that suggests the game won’t be back until 9am on Thursday, October 10.
That’s a lot later than his earlier prediction of 6am on Tuesday – so in short, no one has any idea when Fortnite will be back up and running.
At least fans have got Fortnite: Chapter 2 to look forward to.
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Emma Rosemurgey is an NCTJ trained Journalist who started her career by producing The Royal Rosemurgey newspaper in 2004, which kept her family up to date with the goings on of her sleepy north east village. She graduated from the University of Central Lancashire in Preston and started her career in regional newspapers before joining Tyla (formerly Pretty 52) in 2017, and progressing onto UNILAD in 2019.