Having been released a little over a week ago, Pokemon GO has already captured the hearts of millions of Pokemon fans all over the world and has even managed to become the most popular mobile game in the history of the United States. However, the games servers have been struggling to cope with traffic since its release due to the overwhelming reception from around the world. The game has suffered yet another server problem leaving many Pokemon trainers without much to do this weekend.
A hacking group has claimed responsibility for taking down the servers using a DDOS attack. Cyber hacking group known as PoodleCorp announced on social media platform Twitter, that it was behind the attack and a post by the groups claimed leader, XO has promised that future attacks on Pokemon GO are imminent. PoodleCorp has recently targeted high profile YouTube stars such as Pewdiepie. Distributed Denial of Service or DDOS is way hackers cause servers to crash by flooding them with a huge amount of requests every second to the point the servers aren’t able to handle the traffic flow, causing servers to crash. Whatever the cause was, Pokemon GO trainers took to social media to vent their frustrations at not being to play the augmented reality game the whole day. However, the creators of the game, Niantic has refused to confirm or deny the allegations by PoodleCorp. The company has posted a message on its website informing trainers that its servers are currently experiencing server issues and that a fix is in the works. In the message, Niantic also thanked all its players for being patient but didn’t mention anything about an attack on its servers.
Pokemon GO was released on July 7th and has since been downloaded more than 10 million times from the Play Store. The game was first officially released in Australia, New Zealand and North America but has since been released to other countries, mainly in Europe. The game was officially made available in the Play Store yesterday for 26 European countries but that is only the starting of a much wider release as Niantic has plans to make the game available in roughly 200 regions by the end of the rollout.