A group by the name of Poodle Corp. has claimed responsibility for a distributed denial of service (DDos) attack that has taken the servers of insanely popular augmented reality game Pokemon GO offline.

The attack, which started just prior to the game being launched in 26 new countries, started Saturday and continued into early Sunday, according to reports.

Not surprisingly, thousands of players who had planned to spend their Saturday catching Pokemon were highly unimpressed, particularly given that the app suggested that the problems were due to lack of services, with a note reading “Our servers are humbled by your incredible response.”

Pokemon GO developer Niantic, Inc. also blamed overwhelming response for the downtime versus a DDoS attack, saying on Twitter that “due to the incredible number of Pokémon GO downloads, some Trainers are experiencing server connectivity issues. Don’t worry, our team is on it!”

While the DDoS attack was not officially confirmed, a Twitter account by the name of @PokeGoServers, which as the name suggests monitors Pokemon GO servers, tweeted “Conclusive reason for server delays this morning — DDoS attack (Denial of Service) by ‘hackers’ from PoodleCorp.”

After Poodle Corp. claimed responsibility for the downtime, the group went further and claimed that the attack was only a “little test” and that they are planning on doing something “on a larger scale soon.”

PoodleCorp is credited with having previously hacked YouTube accounts including WatchMojo, Redmercy, Lilly Singh and Leafyishere and DDoS’d a number of other games including League of Legends.

Growing pains

In 2016 DDoS attacks are pretty much expected now against popular apps, websites, and games, so the fact that it has occurred with Pokemon GO should come as no surprise.

What perhaps is surprising is Niantic’s inability to deal with it.

Yes, the game has been an unprecedented success and will go into the history books, but scaling and servers in the age of the cloud are not rocket science in 2016, even at the sort of scale required for Pokemon GO.

Niantic has plenty of money in the bank, including from Google, so why it couldn’t be scaling properly using Google Cloud services is the big mystery here.

Whatever the reason they need to get their server issues sorted out: while the game remains popular now ongoing issues will see people abandon Pokemon GO nearly as quickly as they took it up.

Image credit: Poodle Corp.