You can't possibly have failed to notice that the world has gone Pokémon Go crazy, and wherever there are folks trying to enjoy a new game, there will be people attempting to mess with that fun – and one way to do that is to bring down the Pokémon Go servers with a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack.
Yes, the bad guys opened fire this weekend just gone, hitting the game's servers and causing users in the UK and the US to be unable to log on – which as you can imagine, didn't go down well with Pokémon Go addicts.
A group called PoodleCorp (a hacktivist collective with a much fluffier name than Lizard Squad) claimed it was their DDoS work which caused the outage.
As the Independent reports, on Saturday PoodleCorp tweeted: "PokemonGo #Offline #PoodleCorp", followed by a comment to the effect that bigger things were in the works: "Just was a lil test, we will do something on a larger scale soon."
Of course, whether or not the group actually caused the outage is another question, as that hasn't been verified.
August assault
But it seems that PoodleCorp is certainly serious enough about staging a bigger assault on the game, and this will happen at the start of next month according to the group's most recent tweet, which read: "August 1st #PoodleCorp #PokemonGo."
August 1 is a Monday, interestingly enough, as you would have thought the weekend would be the obvious target, as it was in the recent attack.
As we reported over the weekend, in a more constructive move to help Pokémon Go players, Yelp has added a filter to its app to aid players in finding nearby PokéStops – at least in the US, Australia and New Zealand. Hopefully the feature will be coming to the UK soon.
- Check out our Pokémon Go tips and tricks guide
