You may have read yesterday about the cybersecurity alert that hit sites and apps around the world after two vulnerabilities were found in the popular programming language, PHP. The Pokémon Company were one of the many teams hit by the outage, with Pokémon HOME, Sleep and Champions all going offline yesterday without an end time in sight. Well, fortunately, they have started to come back.
As shared on the apps’ official social media accounts, it seems that TPC is now on top of the issue and is in the process of restoring functionality. Champions was the first to come back online at around 3am BST this morning, followed by HOME a few hours later. Pokémon Sleep was a little later to join the party, but ended its maintenance around 10am BST.
Fortunately, everything is back to normal now, it seems. But still, seeing a huge swathe of Pokémon services shut down for such a long period is a pretty big deal.
For those who missed yesterday’s news, the PHP vulnerabilities were said to be found in versions of the programming language dating back to 2004, and had the potential to allow hackers to tinker with site commands and run remote code if exploited.
Given that an estimated 70% of all sites on the internet use PHP, many took Pokémon’s approach yesterday and went offline while the necessary patches were installed.
Such a big vulnerability discovery makes us wonder whether such messes will appear more frequently in the future — be that as repercussions of this PHP situation or new exploits entirely. Either way, most services seem to be back up and running now, thankfully.
Did you feel the absence of Pokémon apps yesterday? Let us know in the comments
