Pokémon Go was down this weekend for most users worldwide. After rolling out the viral mobile game to over 20 more countries this weekend, the servers crashed.
This was followed by a distributed-denial-of-service (DDOS) attack, meaning most of the 7.5 million Pokémon trainers across the globe could not logon to pursue their quest of catching them all.
Last week, the free-to-play location-based augmented reality mobile game was only officially available in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Germany, although players in other countries, including SA, were able to side-load the app.
On Saturday, the company announced the game would be available in 26 new countries across Europe, including Estonia, Romania and Sweden. A few hours later, the company reported it was experiencing server issues and players were logged out of the game.
Pokémon Go tweeted: "We have received reports of #PokemonGO login issues. Hopefully this is only a temporary step for new regional releases."
Industry analyst Ben Bajarin tweeted: "The Pokémon Go server issues show us how hard cloud still is at scale. Even for a company that came out of Google."
The outage lasted the whole weekend and only early this morning was it reported that players were slowly able to get back in.
Malicious or opportunistic?
While Pokémon Go blamed the server issues on the influx of new players, hacker group Poodle Corp claimed it was behind the crash by mounting a DDOS attack, in which servers are flooded with so many requests they eventually crash.
The group warned it is planning another attack for early next month.
Meanwhile, the company behind the game tweeted: "We have received reports regarding a potential DDOS attack on #PokemonGO servers on August 1st. We will let you know when we have more info."
This morning, Pokémon announced the game is officially available in Canada.
There is no date yet for the official launch in SA, but the company said today it hoped to rollout the game to 200 countries and regions "relatively soon".
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