Pokémon Go players looking to get their weekend fix of the popular augmented reality smartphone game were left frustrated on 16 July as a major outage hit the game's servers yet again. This time, however, a hacking collective PoodleCorp claimed responsibility for taking down Niantic's servers using an alleged DDoS attack.

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The reported attack took place just hours after the mega-hit game rolled out in 26 more countries in Europe including Ireland, Greece, Sweden and Poland.

A DDoS attack, or Distributed Denial of Services, takes place when a malicious individual floods a server with too many requests than the company's server can handle in order to bring it down.

Pokemon Go
A woman holds up her cell phone as she plays the Pokemon Go game in Lafayette Park in front of the White House in Washington, DC Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

The hacker group took to Twitter to claim responsibility for the latest disruption.

Sporting over 80,000 followers on the social media network, the group's Twitter account also retweeted a post by user XO that reads: "Just was a lil test, we will do something on a larger scale soon."

The group has also targeted famous YouTubers including H3H3 productions and Pewdiepie of late, GearNuke reports.

Although PoodleCorp's claim of responsibility has yet to be verified or confirmed by Niantic Labs, the official Pokémon Go Twitter account did acknowledge the game's server troubles.

After the servers went down and word of the alleged attack got out, furious players took to social media to voice their anger and frustration.

Since its release earlier this month, the GPS-powered game has continued to struggle with server issues given its rapidly growing massive player base, delaying its global rollout.

DDoS attacks, which are not the same as hacks, have become an annoyingly frequent occurrence in the gaming industry.

Last month, Blizzard's servers suffered another outage due to a reported DDoS attack claimed by notorious hacking collective Lizard Squad, preventing users from accessing the company's games, following a massive attack that brought the server to its knees in April.

The group also targeted Sony and Microsoft on Christmas 2014 with a series of huge DDoS attacks that brought down PlayStation Network and Xbox Live during the holidays.

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