Pokemon GO is a massive hit, but, its launches are usually plagued with issues. Google’s Director of Customer Reliability Engineering, Luke Stone, reveals in a blog post though that the reason for many of the faults during the launches of Pokemon GO isn’t necessarily the game itself. Rather, it’s the number of people playing it at any given time. He stated that he had never “taken part in anything close to the growth that […] customer Niantic experienced with the launch of Pokémon GO.”
To prove his point, he showed the following graph of people playing the game:
This proves that the game traffic is easily the biggest problem, which is proof that people really did want to catch them all. Also proof, is during the New Zealand launch of the game, player usage broke all expectations within 15 minutes!
“When issues emerged around the game’s stability,” continues Stone, “Niantic and Google engineers braved each problem in sequence, working quickly to create and deploy solutions. Google CRE worked hand-in-hand with Niantic to review every part of their architecture, tapping the expertise of core Google Cloud engineers and product managers — all against a backdrop of millions of new players pouring into the game.”
