Last week, Fortnite Battle Royale unexpectedly went down due to emergency maintenance. When the game still wasn’t back online this morning, players to flocked to social media to search for a more detailed explanation of the delay.
A fake tweet from Epic Games has been circulating on social media that reads: "Due to the law suit against PubG on copyright infringement. We are sorry to inform you that Fortnite Battle Royale will be coming to an end on May 24, 2018. Save the world will still be in development and we will roll out ASAP. Thank you for all your support."
Another went out from imposter account JWFortnite saying, ”We are sorry to announce, Fortnite has recently received a Lawsuit from PuBg. We can not continue to operate Battle Royale, Save the World is still under development so that is the only way to operate Fortnite from now on. Thank you for your time.”
While the tweet immediately looks and feels suspicious, especially without an official press release or announcement, many players fell for it. One player responded, “So wait what the hells happening with the 120$ I spent on skins and gliders and pick axes and battle passes?????” Many others tweeted the gaming community, asking them to verify whether or not the story was true or false.
In fact, there has been no word from Epic Games or Bluehole Corporation about any lawsuit that would result in Fortnite Battle Royale being shut down. Bluehole has however filed a lawsuit against NetEase for trademark and copyright violations. Net Ease has two battle royale games currently available on mobile, Rules of Survival and Knives Out.
It would be expected that Fortnite players would just jump over to PUBG while they waited for the game to come back online. Instead, they flocked to Radical Heights, a new battle royale similar in style to Fortnite that's also free to play. It didn't hurt that Ninja hoped on for a few rounds, skyrocketing Radical Heights to the #1 spot on Twitch, with over 200,000 people watching.
Fortnite first began experiencing technical difficulties and login issues on April 11th around 5:00pm EST. Epic Games kept their player base updated about when Fortnite Battle Royale would be back online through regular tweets, posts on Reddit, and their official site. All issues were resolved the following day.
