Pokémon trainers have always had to deal with hardships like tough gym leaders, that meddling Team Rocket, and finding rare legendary creatures. But now you can add a new obstacle to the list: overloaded servers.
Pokémon Go is experiencing another major round of outages around the world as the United States reaches the end of its work day. Intermittent troubles have plagued the game since its debut earlier this month. Many players are getting a screen that confirms the location-based monster-catching app’s servers are overloaded, and others seeing the app freeze during crucial moments. Now, scores of players on social media are complaining about disconnections and other bugs. These issues are primarily due to an influx of players overwhelming the online service. Pokémon Go has already shot to the top of the download and revenue charts on Apple and Google devices. That’s an impressive performance in the $36.9 billion mobile gaming industry, but it also means that the servers for the always-connected game are struggling under the demand.
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1998080,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,games,mobile,","session":"B"}']Developer Niantic and publisher The Pokémon Company planned to finally launch Pokémon Go in Japan today, but it has yet to do so. The companies are worried that pocket-monster-crazy country could put an enormous strain on the servers, and they’re afraid to launch the game when everyone is expecting it.
While some people are still able to get connected to the game, server issues are causing bugs where nothing else appears on the world map. Allow this tweet to illustrate:
When I'm looking for Pokemon, but the servers are down and no Pokemon are showing up. pic.twitter.com/52u9yHG3Q7
— D-Piddy ? (@_dpiddy) July 7, 2016
GamesBeat has asked developer Niantic, the studio responsible for the game, for a comment on the state of the servers, and it has previously pointed to this tweet:
Thank you for your patience. We have been working to fix the server issues. We will continue rolling out #PokemonGO to new countries soon.
— Pokémon GO (@PokemonGoApp) July 8, 2016
When Pokémon Go’s servers are down, the app is nearly unusable. Beyond the errors, Go relies on an internet connection to load in map data and to sprinkle Pokémon around your world. Without a cellular connection, it game would know your GPS location, but it wouldn’t load in the world around you. This is one of the reasons why the game does not work on Wi-Fi-only tablets.
Updated on Wednesday, July 20 at 2:15 p.m. with info on a new outage.
Edited on Monday, July 11 at 5:15 p.m.: The game is once again having major issues.
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Edit: Updated on Friday, July 8 as the outages continue.