Pokemon GO under attack! PoodleCorp takes down the popular game.
Just when we thought things couldn’t get crazier with Pokemon GO, it seems they have. Pokemon GO is currently under attack, with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) taking over Niantic’s servers, just days after they launched in eastern Europe.
Pokemon GO’s launch has been plagued with a wide variety of problems, ranging from the infamous pokemon capture lockup, to the app having to be pulled from Play and App Store due to server overload during the first few days of launch.
Aside from that, people have been going nuts with the app, doing all kinds of crazy stuff. A guy crashed his car after trying to capture a Pokemon, another one fell off a bridge because he thought he needed to reach out further to make the capture… and just yesterday thousands of people stampeded into Central Park, New York, looking for a rare Vaporeon that appeared.
Well, hacker group PoodleCorp seems to be wanting to have a little fun too, and they’re looking to take down the game. According to their Twitter feed, they were the ones responsible for a DDoS attack that took down Niantic’s Pokemon site during the game’s launch in several Scandinavian countries.
Niantic said it was working on the problem, and by Saturday afternoon, the game had resumed and everything was back on line.
However, Sunday morning once again brought about problems for players all over the world. Many reported that the game was not loading, becoming stuck on the “be aware of your surroundings” screen before crashing into the “Cannot log into server” error message. Others received the more benevolent Pokemon GO blue screen of death:
Niantic hasn’t said much about the problem that started on Sunday, so it’s not completely clear whether this is another DDoS attack, or just server overload. The game launched in eastern Europe on Saturday, and Sunday at dawn Niantic announced they had launched in Canada:
One could suppose that since servers in America were overloaded with the US launch, adding Canada to the mix could make things worse. Or, Niantic may have just shut down server access for those not in authorized countries, as many people are simply downloading the APK file off the Internet in order to install where Pokemon GO isn’t available. They could just be trying to make more space available for people in Canada and Europe that are supposed to be playing, by taking those that aren’t supposed to be playing yet off the game.
In any case, the Pokemon service is dead slow, at least in non-authorized countries right now, after working normally for a while Saturday and last week. So, guess we’ll just have to wait and see whether things clear up in the next couple of days. Patience people, you’ll soon be able to play Pokemon GO in your country with everyone else.
