Pokémon Go is now available in 26 new countries, which gives the wildly popular mobile game the ability to disappoint more people than ever with the multi-hour server outage we’ve been experiencing this morning. Update 2: Oh thank goodness, our nightmare is over.
Pokémon Go’s massive reach gives Niantic Labs unprecedented power to ruin people’s mornings en masse. Twitter has been abuzz with server down complaints for hours. As of this writing the developer has not acknowledged the outage, let alone given a time frame for service restoration.
The downtime might have something to do with Niantic’s most recent official communication, announcing the game’s availability in 26 more countries.
Pokémon GO is available in twenty-six new countries. As of tonight, Trainers living in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Greenland, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, and Switzerland are able to download Pokémon GO from the Play Store or App Store.
The announcement was made five hours ago. Server complaints began around two hours later.
Hopefully the servers will be up soon. Until then we shall collectively stare wistfully out of our windows, thumb mindlessly flicking the base of our phones.
Update 2: 7/16 1 PM — Servers seem to have been restored to their previous functionality, which should be good enough.
Update 1: 7/16 12 PM — The official Pokémon Go Twitter has acknowledged the downtime and is working on getting the servers working correctly.
Meanwhile, our sister site Gizmodo is reporting that a hacking collective calling itself PoodleCorp is claiming credit for the downtime.