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Pokémon GO has been an unbridled success since information technology launched about two weeks agone, and that comes amongst sometimes crippling server issues. Developer Niantic was forced to dull its global rollout so it could add together server capacity, and there are notwithstanding some days that the game just won't connect. This past weekend was especially bad, and now a hacking group called OurMine is claiming responsibility for the downtime.

If yous take non heard of Pokémon Go, I can simply assume you've been living nether a rock sans cyberspace access for the last few weeks. Announced concluding twelvemonth, the game grew out of a 2022 April Fools prank at Google that scattered all the original 151 Pokémon around Google Maps. It was a big hitting, and Niantic (owned past Google at the time) started working with The Pokémon Company to go far 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 belief — you'll encounter people out playing the game about everywhere. Niantic rolled the game out to 26 boosted countries over the weekend, which many blamed for the issues. The game was inaccessible most of Saturday, throwing up server errors whenever near players tried to connect. OurMine says it carried out a DDoS assail on Niantic's servers, and that was to blame for the outage, not an influx of new players.

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Co-ordinate to a representative of OurMine, the grouping merely wants to "protect" Niantic's servers. So, obviously the best way is to inundation them with traffic and ruin everyone'southward Saturday. OurMine says it will terminate attacking Pokémon GO if someone from Niantic contacts the group so they tin can "teach them how to protect their servers." That does not seem likely to happen. This situation is very reminiscent of the Cadger Squad hacks of several years ago that targeted popular gaming services like Xbox Live and PSN.

So what now? Since it'southward non likely Niantic'due south engineers are going to come crawling to some internet pranksters for security tips, the attacks will probably proceed until they become bored. A separate grouping, PoodleCorp, says information technology has a Pokémon Go DDoS scheduled for August 1st. Hopefully Niantic tin can at least get its regular server load under control before it's hit once more. You might desire to get working on catching 'em all now merely in case.