Here's Why The Pokemon Go Servers Were Always Crashing At Launch

One of the biggest problems that Pokemon Go suffered from during the early days was people trying to get online and play without the servers crashing. The server issues were persistent for quite some time and there was a reason why the Pokemon Go servers were always crashing at launch.

According to a Google blog relating to the Cloud Platform services hosted by the tech giant, Pokemon Go had a target traffic goal of only 1x the cloud data storage transaction rate per second. They estimated that at worst, they would receive 5x that amount of traffic on the heaviest of days during Pokemon Go's launch. The reality? They received 50x more actual traffic than their initial estimates, causing servers to periodically crash from the load.

According to the post on Google's blog, they received 10 times the amount of worst case scenario traffic estimates, which resulted in Google CRE having to provide additional cloud capacity and services for Niantic Lab's Pokemon Go.

The post mentions how they used some tricky techniques to help Niantic expand the game world while also ensuring they didn't disrupt play for existing users whenever they launched the game in a new region. They go over how Google's network helped prevent major latency issues in Pokemon Go, despite having so many reported server outages and issues.

I suppose the moral of the story is that had it not been hosted on Google's cloud services, the latency and connection issues would have been 50 times worse than what they were.

At the end of the day most average users would likely never think twice about this kind of news because there isn't really anything that they can do about it, but it does help explain exactly why some players were having a tough time playing the game.

During its heyday Pokemon Go was one of the most used and most popular apps during its launch, and it also managed to surpass a couple of milestones in record time, beating out King's Candy Crush Saga and the Clash of Clans when it came to making more than $500 million as an app.

The game has proven to be a major asset to Nintendo's mobile offerings, giving the company a major boost on both the stock market and in the consumer market.

In fact, Pokemon Go's popularity had direct influence on the sales of other Pokemon games under the Nintendo label, including games on the Nintendo 3DS and the Nintendo 3DS hardware itself.

The spread and popularity of the app definitely makes sense when you compare it to the chart that Google discussed on the blog. The only issue is that they don't actually give hard numbers on the stats, so we're basically left blind to go on estimates surrounding the actual traffic figures. Having a 1x traffic estimate doesn't really tell anyone just how much traffic Niantic expected for the game, but I guess we're all left to safely assume that receiving 50x traffic was easily enough to make the servers crash.

Things have definitely stabilized since the early days of the launch, and it goes to show that Niantic and Google are working hard to make the gameplay experience in Pokemon Go as comfortable as possible.