The Pokemon Go servers are hardly rock solid at the best of times, but if you were planning a Mewtwo hunt on August 1 you might want to reschedule.
The hacker group PoodleCorp are threatening to carry out a DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack on the first day of next month, which would mean a Pokemon blackout for 24 hours. For all those virtual Pokemon loitering around parks and cities, getting gradually sick of dodging Pokeballs left, right and centre, this probably isn’t the worst news. For the millions of budding trainers, however, it won’t go down well at all.
https://twitter.com/PoodleCorp/status/754845127114387456
You might remember that PoodleCorp also claimed responsibility for the last major Pokemon Go outage, although this was dismissed by hacktivist group Anonymous, who said the downtime was simply due to the volume of users trying to access the app.
The servers are down because of a worldwide outroll of the application, simply too many people are playing. https://t.co/0noje8YzX9
— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) July 16, 2016
Although there’s been no confirmation that PoodleCorp were the perpetrators, the Twitter account @xotehpoodle, owned by someone claiming to be the leader of the group, said afterwards that they would ‘do something on a larger scale soon’.
The website Mic asked the user why the group were going after Pokemon Go, who simply replied: “We do it because we can, nobody can stop us and we just like to cause chaos. We chose August 1 so we have time to relax and not care about doing anything.”
Mic also asked if PoodleCorp were gamers themselves. They weren’t, according to @xotehpoodle, who added: “rofl.”
We can’t see anybody else rofl’ing.
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