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For Pokemon Go, it's stop -- at least temporarily

The crazy-popular mobile game from Nintendo is crashing servers, so its rollout has been paused in some countries.

Edward Moyer Senior Editor
Edward Moyer is a senior editor at CNET and a many-year veteran of the writing and editing world. He enjoys taking sentences apart and putting them back together. He also likes making them from scratch. ¶ For nearly a quarter of a century, he's edited and written stories about various aspects of the technology world, from the US National Security Agency's controversial spying techniques to historic NASA space missions to 3D-printed works of fine art. Before that, he wrote about movies, musicians, artists and subcultures.
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Watch this: Pokemon Go aftermath: Nintendo's stock surges, malware spreads


Pokemon Stop?

That seems to be the case in some countries, where the rollout of Nintendo's wildly popular mobile game Pokemon Go has been put on hold because of overloaded servers.

While server capacity gets rejiggered, the worldwide introduction of the game to places like Britain and the Netherlands has been "paused until we're comfortable," Niantic CEO John Hanke told Business Insider. Niantic co-created the game with Nintendo.

"We thought the game would be popular, but it obviously struck a nerve," Hanke told BI.

After Pokemon Go became the No. 1 free app in Apple's US iTunes store, shares of Nintendo jumped. The state of Washington's Department of Transportation also felt compelled to post a tweet urging "No Pokemoning from behind the wheel."

With the pause, then, folks in the UK can take a break, hop in the Mini, and race out quick for a packet of crisps. Or they can jump on Twitter and check out the various jokes about the app's popularity and the beleaguered servers. Here's one for starters:

Update, 3:13 p.m. PT: A Niantic representative sent us this statement from the company: "We have been diligently working to resolve the server issues and will continue rolling out Pokemon Go to new countries in the coming days."