Update: The game is back online; sanity has been restored, mass hysteria avoided, cats and dogs are living together ... The original post has been edited.
Pokémon Go was offline for much of Saturday morning in the U.S. as a major outage has hit the game's servers around the same time the game has launched in more than two dozen countries. A hacking group claimed responsibility for the outage.
Pokémon Go's official Twitter feed acknowledged the outage in late morning.
Trainers! We have been working to fix the #PokemonGO server issues. Thank you for your patience. We'll post an update soon.
— Pokémon GO (@PokemonGoApp) July 16, 2016
Around the time the outage began, a hacking collective said it had brought down the wildly popular game, which launched in the U.S. on July 5.
PokemonGo #Offline #PoodleCorp
— PoodleCorp (@PoodleCorp) July 16, 2016
Niantic Labs announced early Saturday that the game was available in 26 European nations. A few hours afterward, the servers went offline.
Pokémon Go requires a server log-in to play; problems with server capacity delayed the game's global rollout following its launch last week in the U.S., Australia and New Zealand.