When will Fortnite come back online, will there be a new map ahead in Season 11?

Fortnite is currently down, with only a special hidden minigame playable on the loading screen as the battle royale portion remains unavailable.

Fortnite has a habit of doing gimmicky things in-between seasons (rocket launches, cubes travelling the map, volcano eruptions) but the latest event has overshadowed them all: a black hole sucked appeared and sucked the entire map into it.

That's left an awful lot of players all around the world asking: what happened to Fortnite? Where is Season 11, and when will it start?

You can look below to find a full recap of the events that have happened in-game so far.

WHY IS FORTNITE DOWN?

Fortnite appears to be undergoing some sort of server maintenance, but rather than the usual way Epic takes the game offline, the developer managed to suck the whole game (UI and all!) into a black hole, leaving nothing but a burger-shooting mini-game behind.

A countdown timer existed in the game for a while before the Black Hole appeared, and when it finally reached zero, the entire map was sucked into a huge void.

The Meteor, an item that was at the centre of what a lot of Fortnite Season 10, smashed into a vortex which had been created by missiles that had appeared from extra-dimensional rifts.

That's a lot to digest, eh?

All of that created a black hole which is now keeping the game offline.

• Fortnite Season 11 Save the World free codes coming to PS4, Xbox and Nintendo Swicth?

WHEN WILL FORTNITE RETURN?

Brace yourselves, there may be some bad news ahead.

Initially, trusted dataminer and long-time Fortnite sleuth @Lucas7yoshi has dug up some information that seems to suggest the actual end of ‘The End’ event (as the black hole is officially known)could last until 6am ET this coming Tuesday.

That would mean Fortnite servers could stay down for nearly two days.

Then, @Lucas7yoshi tweeted:

The http://fortnite.com code was updated so the the-end thing has its end_time as Thursday at 4am EST
i really doubt they really going to make people not play for 4 days or whatever straight but its epic lmao
take it as you will

Eep.

It's uncertain if this is the case. Even games like Destiny, when they launch whole new expansions, don't have to take the game offline for more than a few hours for maintenance.

But if this is a whole new game, so to speak, with Fortnite finally leaving Early Access, we could be seeing a lot of changes come to the title – improved graphics, more game modes, a whole new map, revamped mechanics… there are many, many potential outcomes from this downtime.

SO… WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

Fortnite is at least giving us some breadcrumbs about what's happening in the form of what appears to be coded messages.

Fortnite leaker AAOBI suggests the numbers appearing on the black hole screen correspond to a code you can use to decipher a message from The Visitor’s recordings.

Said message reads: “I was not alone. Others are outside the loop this was not calculated. The Zero Point is now inevitable.”

Zero Point challenges appeared in the game in Season 10, so it's not a new reference.

No one is sure what happens next, or when we'll be able to play Fortnite again – but you have to agree, this is all pretty exciting, right?

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