Players face down time as hackers plan Pokemon Go shutdown today

IF you’re one of the millions trying to catch ‘em all, it’s bad news. Hackers have vowed to shut down Pokemon Go today for 24 hours.

Pokemon Go has been installed on more than 75 million smartphones around the world since its July 5 release. Photo by Mike Coppola/Getty Images

POKEMON Go players around the world could find themselves twiddling their thumbs today with hacking group PoodleCorp vowing to take the game offline for 24 hours.

PoodleCorp claimed responsibility for the Pokemon Go servers crashing two weeks ago although Niantec, the makers of the hit mobile game, blamed the problems on network congestion caused by the game’s phenomenal growth.

Leader of the PoodleCorp, who goes by the Twitter handle @xotehpoodle, said in an interview on YouTube that it would bring the game down just to make the game players irate.

“Because we can and chaos is entertainment,” the hacker told YouTuber Daniel Keem. “We like to make people angry.”

News Corporation Australia has contacted Pokemon Go’s creator Niantic about the threat but it has not commented on the planned attack.

August 1st #PoodleCorp #PokemonGo

— PoodleCorp (@PoodleCorp) July 18, 2016

The PoodleCorp group took to Twitter to announce the attack plan.

The group said it would launch a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, flooding the Niantic servers with a with a tool that generates repeated connections from about 600,000 devices.

Analyst group Sensor Tower reported that Pokemon Go has been installed on more than 75 million smartphones around the world since its July 5 release and was the fastest mobile game ever to reach the 50 million downloads benchmark.

Jerry Di Re, of the Brisbane Pokemon Go Social Club, said if a hacking group was to target the game it would be unfair to a lot of people.

“Pokemon GO is a harmless part of my day that I enjoy immensely, and while I understand why a hacking group would consider it a valuable target, it would be really disappointing to see it go down for a publicity stunt”,” he said.