Pokemon Home, Pokemon Champions, and Pokemon Sleep go offline

A global cybersecurity issue has affected several Pokemon apps. Two vulnerabilities were discovered in PHP, a programming language used by numerous websites and applications, raising serious security concerns.

Several cybersecurity agencies urged organizations that were unable to apply the necessary fixes in time to consider temporarily taking their websites offline. According to the BBC, this led organizations such as the Finnish government, Edinburgh City Council, and the BBC itself to take certain pages offline.

To put things into perspective, PHP is used by around 70% of websites, including Pokemon Home, Pokemon Champions, and Pokemon Sleep. All three services are currently unavailable, raising the possibility that The Pokémon Company took them offline in response to the cybersecurity risk.

Kotaku, which reported on the situation, noted that attempting to access Pokemon Home resulted in a Japanese error message that did not go away. The message translates to: “We are currently under maintenance. Please wait a moment until maintenance is finished.” Pokemon Champions appears to launch normally, but shortly afterward displays a warning reading: “Emergency maintenance is currently ongoing.” Neither app provides an estimate for when service will be restored.

As the severity of the PHP vulnerabilities becomes more widely understood, many other websites and applications could also be taken offline temporarily. The vulnerabilities affect PHP versions dating back to PHP 5, released in 2004, and could allow malicious actors to execute commands on web servers running the scripting language, potentially carrying out a wide range of actions. In other words, the flaws are extremely serious, as they could allow attackers to execute code remotely.

Although patches have already been released to address the vulnerabilities, the updates must be applied across affected systems to ensure servers and websites are secure. Until that happens, millions of websites could remain vulnerable to attacks.

According to the BBC, an update was released today to address the issue.

We will share any further updates as they become available. Check out more Nintendo news by clicking here.