This past weekend was particularly frustrating for Pokemon GO players, there were reports of servers going down for an extended period of time. There was no ETA on when they would be back or even a cause. It was thought that servers went down because of too many people attempting to play at once.
While that might very well be the case, as Niantic released Pokemon Go in quite a few regions over the weekend, a hacking group has claimed to be the cause of servers being down.
According to PCMag, a hacking group called 'OurMine' claimed that their three-person team brought down servers because they were "just trying to protect [companies'] servers." The anonymous hacker went on to say, "We will stop the attack if any [Niantic] staff talked with us, because we will teach them how to protect their servers."
It appears as though OurMine isn't alone in claiming to have brought Pokemon GO servers down, the hacking group PoodleCorp has also claimed to have brought Pokemon GO offline through a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, and will do so again.
August 1st #PoodleCorp #PokemonGo
— PoodleCorp (@PoodleCorp) July 18, 2016
What really brought the servers down is unclear. It could have been a mix of all three elements, new regions and the two hacker groups or just one of them. Either way, hopefully Niantic expands their servers to keep pesky DDoS attacks at bay.
