Today, Fortnite players battled Galactus, devourer of worlds, in the culmination of the game’s Marvel-flavored fourth season. With the event ending on a cliffhanger, the biggest boy in a fictional universe of very big boys did not end up going down. But Twitch sure did.
In the immediate wake of the event, which millions of viewers watched across tens of thousands of channels, Twitch began to suffer from sitewide issues, rendering it more or less unusable. On Twitter, Twitch acknowledged the outage:
“We are investigating an issue causing multiple services issues at the moment,” the company wrote. “Some of these issues include, but are not limited to: Logging in, loading the site, notifications and alerts, stream details missing, site elements missing.”
Many streamers and viewers speculate that a surge of Galactus gawkers are to blame. While Twitch has not said anything to that effect, it would not be unprecedented. During a June event that flooded Fortnite’s map, Twitch also suffered from issues that caused the site to load improperly or not at all.
As of now, Twitch appears to be regaining functionality, though some users are still reporting malfunctions.
Fortnite’s days as the reigning category on Twitch are firmly in the past, but you’ve gotta hand it to Epic: The developer sure knows how to draw a crowd. Maybe next time, Twitch can hire Galactus to hold up its servers.