Yes, there’s nothing like the smell of success; the sweet, blackened, charred smell of success. With what seems like the entire globe clamoring for an official Pokemon Go release, developer Niantic has been doing its best to accomodate. Unfortunately, upon the release of Go in a bunch of European countries on Saturday morning, that ravaging Poke-hunger proved too much for the game’s servers. Users everywhere reported being unable to log in, and those who were able to access the game discovered it was next to impossible to catch Pokemon between the server lag and a weird bug that has broken the game’s “near” radar.
Things had settled down by Saturday evening, though the “near” radar bug still isn’t fixed. Perhaps Pokemon hunters could enjoy a nice, lazy Sunday catching ‘Mons in the noonday sun?
Perhaps not, as Niantic flipped the switch in Canada early Sunday afternoon. Now, plenty of Android-owning Canadians had already been playing Go by downloading the .apk and side-loading the app, but my own anecdotal evidence says that most of them were tech-savvy young adults. Add the iPhone users and children into the mix, along with the rest of the world trying to catch up with the play they missed on Saturday, and yup, crashy-boom-boom again.
One hacking group (that I won’t bother to name because they don’t deserve publicity) has claimed that it took down the servers, but frankly, the number of people trying to download and play the game at once is practically as good as a DDOS attack on its own. Niantic claims that the outages are simply a result of the app’s explosive popularity. And just think… Go isn’t even available in Asia yet. Remember when the release of the Pokemon Bank took out Japan’s internet infrastructure all by itself? Yeah, expect something like that.
Source: About a million Twitter accounts, including the official Niantic and app accounts.