Pokemon Go crashes and hackers claim responsibility

Pokémon Go mania was put on pause Saturday after the game’s servers crashed due to an apparent attack by hackers. The game launched in 26 new European countries on Saturday, meaning it may have been overcome with an influx of new users rather than brought to its knees by malicious parties.

According to a Pokemon Go updates Twitter account, the downtime was due to a DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack, and hacking group seems to have accepted responsibility.

But it would appear that the creatures were able to roam free on Saturday afternoon as fans posted on social media about how the server was down.

It was released on July 7 and has been downloaded over 10 million times to Android and Apple devices. Naturally, this launch happened this morning, and the surge in new players (and connections) is likely to blame for most of the game’s server issues this morning.

Niantic, the company that created the game, and Nintendo, which owns a large stake in the company, did not respond to requests for comment.

Of course, this can still be attributed to those widespread server issues players have been experiencing over the past week and a half. They simply stated they have been working on a fix for the server issue and thanked trainers for all of their patience.