Is This the End of One Direction?

English boy band One Direction recently announced that they will be taking a one year hiatus after their tour wraps up in March 2016. But fans are worried that this is the end of the group.

Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson and formerly Zayn Malik make up the group who signed with Simon Cowell’s record label, Syco Records, after forming and finishing third in the seventh season of The X Factor in 2010.

The group gained international success quickly thanks to social media and their four albums. Up All Night (2011), Take Me Home (2012), Midnight Memories (2013) and Four (2014) have topped the charts in most markets.

Their achievements include five Brit Awards, four MTV Video Music Awards, eleven MTV Europe Music Awards and nineteen Teen Choice Awards.

Millions of One Direction fans were shocked earlier this week when the chart-topping boy band announced that they’d be taking a break from music. Some 1D followers are afraid that the hiatus will tear the band apart and that the boys will venture out into solo careers. But Simon Cowell said that the break is “healthy and “necessary.”

Cowell told the press at the X-Factor launch, “Look, even though they’re young, that is a grueling schedule and after a while I could see they were exhausted, so when they said, ‘How do you feel about it?’ I said, ‘Do whatever you want.’ Having a year off is going to be a healthy thing.”

The 55-year-old went on to say, “I’ve known for a while that they were going to take this year off. They had to because of their workload. I did what I’ve always done with the guys and said you make your own decisions and I hope you stay together, but you’ve got to want to do it yourself so they’re smart guys, they’ll work it out.”

We can only imagine what the band’s workload has been like for the past five years. What do you think about One Direction taking a year off? Let us know below.