To the surprise of absolutely no one, The Pokémon Company and Niantic's Pokémon Go has so far been a runaway success, with smartphone owners downloading the free-to-play hit in their droves. This overwhelming popularity seems to have had an unwanted knock-on effect however, as the game's servers seem to have struggled to contain the vast quantities of budding Pokémon trainers.

The augmented reality-take on Nintendo's popular catch-em-all RPG has been offline several times over the course of its staggered global launch, with players greeted with the following message when logging in with either a Google or Pokémon Trainer Club account: "Our servers are experiencing issues. Please come back later."

Pokemon Go on IBTimes UK

Users wondering if the game is offline can now check via a (unofficial) website called 'Pokémon Go Server Status', which you can find here. At the time of writing the game is "Offline! (or very unstable)" based on player feedback.

Currently Pokémon Go is only officially available in Australia, New Zealand and parts of North America, with Niantic stating that the GPS-powered app will be available for iPhone, iPad and Android devices "soon" in Canada, Europe and South America. The game is free to download from the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store, however there are in-app purchases within that app that range from £0.79 to £79.99 in the upcoming UK release.

Despite the limited roll-out, eager fans in other regions have been downloading the game from third-party app stores to get their hands on the game early. Whether or not this is effecting the stability of the game's servers is hard to tell, although it is more likely down to the sheer number of players logging-in, especially considering the game sits at the top of most of the download charts in the official release regions.

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