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Pokémon GO has been an unbridled success since it launched about ii weeks ago, and that comes amid sometimes crippling server issues. Developer Niantic was forced to slow its global rollout so it could add server chapters, and in that location are yet some days that the game just won't connect. This past weekend was especially bad, and now a hacking grouping called OurMine is claiming responsibility for the downtime.

If yous have not heard of Pokémon GO, I can only presume you lot've been living under a rock sans internet access for the terminal few weeks. Announced last year, the game grew out of a 2014 Apr Fools prank at Google that scattered all the original 151 Pokémon around Google Maps. It was a large hit, and Niantic (owned by Google at the time) started working with The Pokémon Visitor to make it into a real game. Pokémon Go lets you wander the real world, hunting Pokémon and locating gyms in which to do battle.

The number of people playing the game is almost beyond conventionalities — y'all'll meet people out playing the game almost everywhere. Niantic rolled the game out to 26 additional countries over the weekend, which many blamed for the problems. The game was inaccessible virtually of Sabbatum, throwing up server errors whenever most players tried to connect. OurMine says it carried out a DDoS assault on Niantic's servers, and that was to blame for the outage, not an influx of new players.

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According to a representative of OurMine, the group only wants to "protect" Niantic's servers. So, obviously the all-time way is to inundation them with traffic and ruin everyone'south Saturday. OurMine says information technology volition terminate attacking Pokémon Go if someone from Niantic contacts the group so they tin "teach them how to protect their servers." That does not seem likely to happen. This situation is very reminiscent of the Lizard Squad hacks of several years ago that targeted pop gaming services like Xbox Live and PSN.

So what now? Since it's not probable Niantic's engineers are going to come crawling to some cyberspace pranksters for security tips, the attacks volition probably continue until they go bored. A separate group, PoodleCorp, says it has a Pokémon Go DDoS scheduled for August 1st. Hopefully Niantic can at least go its regular server load under control earlier it's hit again. Yous might want to get working on catching 'em all at present just in case.