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Twitch streamers Kai Cenat and Fanum invited fans to Union Square on Friday for a real-life stream and giveaway. They promised to hand out gift cards, gaming PC equipment and PlayStation 5s.<\/p>\n
But the IRL stream descended into chaos as frenzied fans crowded over the giveaway, shutting down lower Manhattan in the aftermath.<\/p>\n
Cenat, who has 6.5 million Twitch followers<\/a> and 4 million YouTube subscribers<\/a>, advertised the New York City giveaway in now-deleted tweets. He collaborated with Fanum, who has 1.3 million followers on Twitch<\/a> and 1.2 million on YouTube<\/a>. The stream was scheduled for 4:00 p.m. on Friday.<\/p>\n But by 1:10 pm, police responded to a \u201clarge gathering\u201d in the park, a New York Police Department spokesperson told TechCrunch. The spokesperson said that \u201ca couple thousand individuals\u201d crowded into the location. By 3:30, videos of the riot began flooding social media. Fights broke out as people in the crowd climbed vehicles and threw traffic cones.<\/p>\n Cenat\u2019s stream was cut short. A clip<\/a> on his Twitch channel shows the crowd shoving into each other.<\/p>\n