It forced people to interact with friends and enjoy the weather - something which many had failed to do since the game launched in the UK during the week.
According to a Pokemon Go updates Twitter account, the downtime was due to a DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack, and hacking group seems to have accepted responsibility.
https://twitter.com/PoodleCorp/status/754298236093857792
According to the Twitter account @xotehpoodle - purporting to belong to the leader of the group, something 'on a larger scale' will follow.
https://twitter.com/xotehpoodle/status/754329907300339712
While PoodleCorp claims to have been behind the attack, this is yet to be confirmed.
Anonymous have suggested the downtime was, in fact, due to increased strain on the servers caused by a Europe-wide rollout of the augmented reality game.
Pokemon Go officially launched in 26 new countries today, and had already experienced server downtime which caused developers Niantic to push back the official release date in the United Kingdom.
https://twitter.com/YourAnonNews/status/754365037612044288
