'Fortnite' Season 11 "The End" just destroyed the map. What does it mean?

The Season 10 end event leading us into Season 11, dubbed “The End,” has finally come and gone.

During the chaotic event, yet another rocket launched from the island at the location that’s had the countdown for some time now. Once it reached a certain altitude, it fractured space-time and created another huge blue rift — just like the previous rocket launch from several seasons ago. And just like in that event, the rocket propelled through that rift and out another on the map, repeating many times as explosions cascaded everywhere.

Eventually, they all converged at a point on the ground at Dusty Depot, right under the meteor that’s been sitting there all season. Dozens exploded there, opening up a rift large enough to transport the entire meteor into the sky. A laser pointed directly at the Zero Point, leading the meteor to crash directly into it, sending all the players flying high into the sky. Then after some catastrophic reaction, it created a black hole that spaghettified everything — the Zero Point, the meteor, the island, the players.

For at least half an hour, millions of people stared at this black hole in space as Twitch nearly crashed and all official Fortnite social media accounts changed their profile pictures to black screens, some of them with this black hole at the center. Over on Instagram, the official Fortnite account just kept uploading black images over and over.

Even players who were in the main menu when the event occurred saw their entire menu sucked into the same black hole:

The ongoing speculation was that this event would destroy the map, paving the way for a brand-new map in Season 11. The map was definitely destroyed, but so far nothing else has happened. Millions of players are probably still waiting around, but there’s zero indication of when this screen will end and when something else will begin.

Now, the chatter online is that this will eventually lead into Fortnite 2 or Fortnite: Chapter 2 or at the very least finally bring the game out of the bogus “Early Access” period that has been ongoing for quite some time.

This does feel like it could effectively be a widescale loading screen, a way for Epic Games to broadcast a randomized video of this rotating black hole while they take the game servers offline to upload a new game to replace it. This could take hours or even longer. There’s no way to know for sure, but this is the end of an era — and the beginning of something else.

Fortnite: Battle Royale Season X is over, but the story of the game’s future is still developing.