Are the ‘Pokemon Go’ Servers Down Right Now?

pokemon go apple watch buddy

‘Pokemon Go’ is available for iOS and Android devices. (Niantic)

UPDATE: About two hours after the servers originally went down, Niantic announced that they had resolved the issue.


The Pokemon Go servers went down early in the afternoon on Thursday, and they currently remain offline.

Those who attempt to open Pokemon Go at the moment will find an error message saying, “Failed to log in.” You can hit the “retry” button all you like, but the game will not launch. Don’t worry, though: nothing is wrong with your account, and you have not been banned. This is actually just an issue with the game’s servers, and everyone is experiencing it.

Niantic Labs, the developer of Pokemon Go, quickly took to Twitter to confirm that this is a widespread issue and that they are working on it.

You can see the current status of the Pokemon Go servers on this webpage, which currently shows that the game has been offline for about a half hour. Be sure to also follow @PokemonGoApp on Twitter, as they will send out an update as soon as the servers come back online.

This is the first time the Pokemon Go servers have crashed in quite a while. When the mobile game launched back in July, the servers were infamously unstable, largely due to there being a massive number of users flooding the app at once and the game company not being prepared for their app to be such a phenomenon. It was a common experience back then to not be able to play the game for hours at a time.

But in the months since, this has really stopped being much of an issue, and players now very rarely experience any server crashes. As that server status webpage shows, prior to Thursday’s crash, the game had been experiencing 100 percent uptime over a 24 hour period.

It is also the case that Niantic frequently bans users who are spoofing or are cheating in any other way, including by using multiple accounts on the same device. That’s why it was so alarming for many fans to try to log in today and to be presented with what appeared to be an account issue rather than a server issue. In this case, though, being unable to log in has nothing to do with your account.

It’s not clear at this time what might have caused the crash. An update was recently released in the game, but that happened a few days ago, and there have been no major events since then. As soon as the crash occurred, players immediately started to speculate that Niantic is getting ready to launch the second generation of Pokemon and that something went wrong behind the scenes, but that’s pretty much just wishful thinking.

Check back in soon for further updates on the Pokemon GO server outage.