Every single day, Pokemon GO servers seem to be stretched beyond mortal limits. We’ve all found ourselves staring at our frozen phones in disbelief. We’ve all wept over lost and powerful rares. We’re all far too familiar with that taunting loading screen. And every single day, we have strong reason to believe a lot of that trouble is caused by hacker-led DDoS attacks. Specifically the outage earlier today (right when I was trying to catch a level 900+ Scyther, you assholes), was claimed by the group, OurMine.

Hello darkness my old friend.

Even though we may feel like throwing our phones to the heavens and cursing Niantic for their shoddy servers, we should refrain. Even without the existence of DDoS attacks, maintaining a server of hundreds of millions of players isn’t exactly simple. Tossing an attack on top of that can cause even strong servers to buckle. OurMine has a clear goal in mind. They state that the attacks will continue until Pokemon GO reaches out to them so they can advise Pokemon GO on ways to protect the servers. That’s, ummmm, that’s protection money. That’s the same as smashing a store front and demanding the owner pay you so that it doesn’t happen again. I don’t exactly know what’s going to happen as things move forward, but here’s hoping I catch the next Scyther that comes my way.