BEFORE AND AFTER it was released in Ireland over the weekend, Pokémon Go’s servers have experienced downtime as it tries to cope with growing demand.

The most recent outage, which happened on Saturday, occurred when the game was rolled out to another 26 countries including Ireland. But two different hacker groups have claimed to be responsible for different attacks over the weekend.

One of them was PoodleCorp which claimed to be responsible for the downtime experienced by Pokémon Go users on Saturday. Alongside that, it claimed it would take down the game’s servers on 1 August.

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Another group called OurMine said it also launched an attack that took the game down over the weekend – and told TechCrunch it was done as a way to promote stronger security.

The group already made a name for itself by accessing the social media accounts of tech CEOs and celebrities including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

Both groups claim they used a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack to bring down the servers, a tactic which involves flooding a site with fake traffic and overwhelming it so nobody can access it. 

Even without these problems, Niantic Labs, the company behind the game, has struggled to keep the game up and running for users. Over the weekend, it acknowledged the latest outages and said it had dealt with the problem.

Pokémon GO / Twitter Pokémon GO / Twitter / Twitter

Niantic Labs had staggered the rollout of the game as it addressed issues preventing players from going online and other bugs. Despite the issues, the game has been immensely popular.

It has led to moments where large crowds have converged in the same spot, and would rush whenever a rare Pokémon like Vaporeon would appear.

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