Well, this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.

Earlier today, Pokemon GO made another step towards complete global domination by launching in twenty-six countries - including our own little island of Ireland. Already, the app has catapulted straight to the top of the Irish iTunes App Store and has likely doubled, if not quadrupled, the amount of players for Pokemon GO in Ireland alone.

So, what happens when you get a sudden influx of players on a mobile-only game? You get server outages. Lots and lots of server outages.

 

Best we can tell is that it's NOT going to be fixed immediately. Reports seem to suggest that the latest batch of countries where it's been launched are suffering similar problems and, as you can expect, developers Niantic Labs really haven't considered the sheer size of the response the app has been getting.

Early adopters of the game needn't worry in light of the official launch, however. We've confirmed it ourselves that your progress and, more importantly, your saved Pokemon will all remain intact during both the server outages and the official launch.

As it stands, Pokemon GO appears to be down and will continue to be that way for the rest of the weekend most likely. We'll be checking in at regular intervals to see if it's working, but in the meantime, let's just hum the theme tune to ourselves while we wait.

 

 

UPDATE: 18:12

OK, it looks like they're back online here in Dublin and appears to be working around Leinster for the most part. If it's still out in your area, let us know.


UPDATE: 21:03

A hacking group known as PoodleCorp is claiming responsibility for the DDOS attack and are claiming that more attacks are incoming. Niantic Labs, the developers of the app, have acknowledged the server outages, but haven't confirmed the DDOS attack.