Drake and Ninja just broke the internet with a record-breaking Fortnite stream on Twitch

Twitch streamer Tyler “Ninja” Blevins just smashed the gaming site’s record with a little help from rapper Drake. 

The pair began playing Fortnite, the super popular Battle Royale game, at around midnight ET (4am GMT) and within two hours, the stream had more than 600,000 concurrent viewers, while the game dominated four of the top trending topics on Twitter worldwide. At the time of writing, reports suggest the peak viewing figure hit 635,429 and the stream ended at around 8.30am GMT. 

The previous Fortnite Twitch record was 380,000, set in January this year. Thousands of viewers flooded to the stream after Drake tweeted the link to his 37 million Twitter followers. 

 Fortnite

is a multiplayer brawl game in which 100 players parachute out of a plane onto a small island and battle to the death, until only one remains. The players don’t know where they’ll be dropped and have to scavenge for weapons and items, including crossbows and guns. Players can also destroy buildings to collect building materials to create barricades, shelters and more. 

As the game continues, the island, or playable area, effectively shrinks, forcing remaining players together – just like on PlayerUnknown’s Battleground.

A main driver or Fortnite’s overwhelming success is the fact it’s free to play and is available cross platform making it incredibly popular on Twitch as a result. Owing in some part to Ninja’s soaring popularity, too. 

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Between the end of February and the start of March, “Ninja” gained more than 50,000 subscribers with hundreds and thousands of people tuning in each day to watch. At the time of writing, his total subscriber count is a staggering 3,354,130.

The 26-year-old made his name as an esports star, playing competitive Halo. He started his esports career in 2009 and won his first Halo championship for Halo 4 at the Halo 4 Exhibition as a member of the Warriors team. 

Twitch began in 2011 as a spin-off from Justin.tv and was a streaming site dedicated to gaming. It was snapped up by Amazon in 2014. It was thought Google’s YouTube was ready to buy Twitch, but Jeff Bezo’s firm reportedly won the bidding war, picking up the service for $970 million (£584 million).

Twitch provides a platform for gamers to broadcast livestream video of themselves playing, and also hosts on-demand footage from eSports events and a built-in chat function.

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In a statement at the time of acquisition, Jeff Bezos said: “Broadcasting and watching gameplay is a global phenomenon and Twitch has built a platform that brings together tens of millions of people who watch billions of minutes of games each month… we look forward to learning from them and helping them move even faster to build new services for the gaming community.”With Amazon’s support we’ll have the resources to bring you an even better Twitch,” he added.