Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski this week surprised gamers by launching his studio's new battle royale game, Radical Heights, with an "Xtreme Early Access" release.
So naturally, it's a perfect time for Epic Games to have to shut down Fortnite servers for emergency maintenance on Thursday. At the time of writing, Fortnite has been down for eight hours.
We're bringing the servers offline for emergency maintenance. We apologize for this inconvenience. We currently have no ETA on when servers will be back up. Stay updated with our status page here: https://t.co/3y0X6buriO
— Fortnite (@FortniteGame) April 12, 2018
The battle royale genre, where you parachute onto sprawling, weapon-littered terrain, do battle with 99 other players until only one (hopefully you) remains, was popularised last year with PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, or PUBG. Since then, Epic Games has released a free battle royale mode for its Fortnite game, which now rivals PUBG in popularity. Radical Heights, by Boss Key Productions, is the newest challenger in the very-hot-right-now genre.
Fortnite is often played by hip hop superstar Drake, who last month sent the internet insane when he broadcast his video game foibles with popular Twitch streamer Ninja. Conversely, Twitter isn't dealing well with the outage:
So now that Fortnite's been down for the entire day I guess it's time to try meth
— Tim (@TimDotTV) April 12, 2018
Dear Twitter,
— OpTic CouRage (@CouRageJD) April 12, 2018
Everyone go to bed tonight and say a little prayer for the Fortnite servers. Hopefully it gives them enough strength to come back online.
I miss asking my boys “where we droppin’?”
With Love,
Uncle Jack
It’s been 5 or 6 hours since Fortnite went down... beginning to hallucinate, either that or my toaster is a chest.... i should go open it.
— OXTAIL GAWD (@ThatDudeMCFLY) April 12, 2018
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