The shocking event took place around 6am AEDT, when almost all elements tied to the popular title suddenly disappeared for good.

At one point, the game’s official Twitter account even deleted all of its more than 12 000 tweets, leaving a solitary posting: a mysterious stream of the remaining black hole.

Even Fortnite’s Twitch account, which has more than 48 million followers, currently appears completely blank.

Ahead of the game’s eleventh season, speculators believe this could potentially be a whole new chapter for the game, which has more than 250 million players worldwide.

SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE

Events began to unfold rather dramatically overnight, with a rocket launching into the sky and exploding to create rifts — a similar scenario to what had happened during the start of Season 4’s in-game event.

A meteor in the middle of the island that had remained static since the start of Season 10, also began playing up.

After a series of spacecrafts had flown into one of the rifts again and again, players were suddenly sent flying into the air.

As earlier teasers from developers Epic had suggested, the event then lived up to its billing as The End, as all elements were suddenly sucked into darkness.

Fortnite’s YouTube channel features a livestream of the explosion, which more than one million people had tuned in to watch live on Twitch.

Some viewers pointed out a series of numbers that appeared around the black hole during the stream: 146, 11, 15, and 62.

This led gamers to attempted to decipher the code, with one even pointing out that the numbers typed into Google Maps produced an image of a “crab rave.”

Since then, more numbers have appeared near the black hole, adding to global speculation about what comes next for the title.

The Ask PlayStation Twitter account also needed to reassure gamers that developers Epic were aware of the blackout “issue,” after concerned individuals began to reach out to Sony directly.

Reports suggest that it’s most likely Season 11 will start on Thursday, October 17, in keeping with previous seasons of the game.

However, with Monday being part of the Columbus Day holiday weekend in the US, some are hoping there may be surprises in store as early as tomorrow.

This story originally appeared on The Sun and is republished with permission.