An Ellen DeGeneres Death Hoax Went Viral and #RIPEllen Memes Are All Over Twitter

From Cosmopolitan

• #RIPEllen is trending on Twitter after an Ellen DeGeneres death hoax went viral.

• Ellen is fully alive, so don't panic!

• This comes after rumors that her talk show might get cancelled.

Let's get one thing clear right away: Ellen DeGeneres is alive despite #RIPEllen going viral on Twitter last night. But if you hopped on the app and were immediately panicked when you saw everyone tweeting their condolences while simultaneously dragging her, you're not alone. Underneath the #RIPEllen search, you'll also find related searches like "#RIPEllen why" and "#RIPEllen explained." Honestly, fair.

To save you from sifting through those hashtags looking for an explanation to no avail, allow me to set the scene: Last week, rumors started to swirl about Ellen's talk show being cancelled on top of her tanking reputation, which has been on the downturn since she defended her friendship with George W. Bush and ditched Dakota Johnson's birthday. So with all that looming in the background, someone on Twitter joked that Ellen had passed away. To really hammer home that this is a huge hoax, a ton of Twitter users posted photos of their favorite celebrities with short blonde hair along with the hashtag and sentiments like, "I would say fly high, but we all now that’s not where ur going" and "My heart broke when i read the news words cannot describe my devistation. rest easily in hell." Big yikes.

Even though the tweets were clearly jokes, seeing #RipEllen trending was jarring. It's not clear if anybody close to Ellen thought this trend was real, but that would truly be upsetting if so. Ellen hasn't responded to this hashtag, but she did just tweet about the the presidential primary election, so maybe she saw it, ignored it, and decided to focus on more pressing issues.

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