After Pokemon Go servers crashed the second time since the game’s launch earlier this month and just days after the European release date, the game maker Niantic put the blame on a unprecedented surge in downloads. However, a hacker group dubbed PoodleCorp said on Twitter that the latest server crash was its own work.
On Saturday game servers underwent a blackout in Europe. Over the weekend the mobile app game was launched on the Old Continent. Pokemon trainers from more than two dozen countries defied weather and went on a outdoors to hunt collectible pokemons.
Millions of player downloaded the app in its first days following release.
The augmented-reality-based app projects mythical creatures from the Pokemon franchise on the real world. The digital creatures can be viewed through smartphones and they can spawn everywhere from parks and streets to museums and stores.
In a recent blog post Niantic team said that the “incredible” number of downloads have caused some users to have connectivity troubles.
“Don’t worry, our team is on it!,”
Niantic wrote.
Yet in the meantime, a group of hackers said that they were behind the recent server crash in Europe. It is the second time Pokemon Go servers crash. The first time happened in the U.S. days after the game’s official release date on July 6, 2016.
Back then, technicians tracked the problems back to U.S. Pokemon Go fans’ numerous demands to download the app, which overwhelmed game servers.
In Europe, users took to Twitter to voice their complaints over repeated screen freezes in the game. As of late Saturday, European trainers said that the service was back up and running.
Before that, a Twitter user named Loza wrote on July 16 that somebody should take smartphones from kids to prevent servers from crashing on “us adults.” User Joe Booth complained that he cannot achieve his goal of being “the very best” if servers experience shutdowns.
But PoodleCorp bragged on Twitter that they were the ones to bring European servers down. They explained that on Saturday they performed a classical cyber attack called Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS). Similar attacks were conducted to take XBox Live and Sony’s PlayStation Network down on Dec. 25, 2014.
The group tweeted that this was just “a lil test,” and pledged to do “something of a larger scale” on Aug. 1.
Image Source: Flickr
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