Pokemon Go Event Disaster Not Their Fault Says Verizon

Verizon, who partnered with Niantic for their first real world Pokemon Go event, has denied that they had any part to play in the event’s disaster. The widespread unplayability of Pokemon Go during the Grant Park Event ticked off many fervent fans of the game and even led to Niantic’s CEO being jeered off stage.

According to Business Insider (link), Verizon has pushed the blame for the game’s unplayability to Niantic, claiming that it was out of Verizon’s control.

The wireless carrier’s engineers worked with Niantic, the game’s developer, before the event opened in Chicago on Saturday, a Verizon spokesperson told Business Insider. Verizon boosted its capacity for the event, and had representatives in place to make sure its network was up and running.

“This was not a Verizon issue,” the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson added that company engineers “reported that even when attendees were experiencing issues accessing the game itself, other applications like YouTube worked just fine – which indicated the issues were outside of Verizon’s control, like an issue with the game’s server itself.”

While that might be true to a certain extent, the same report also claims that T-mobile users generally had a better time with the game than the other networks, leading to speculations that it might actually be due to the poor cellular coverage.

Not everyone was affected by the outage; players on T-Mobile generally had a better time accessing the game throughout the day.

As theories and speculation continue to spread on the web, Niantic has yet comment on Verizon’s statements. It is not unusual for cell networks to experience serious slowdowns during high density usage such as during the Pokemon Go Event. However,  Niantic also has a track record of being unable to handle the increased load on the app, especially during launches.

Whatever the case, hopefully Niantic and the Cell Providers can work together to figure out the crux of the issue and prevent such a disappointing event from happening again.