Pokemon Go down: As app stops working again, how to check whether it’s even worth trying to play

The game often doesn’t display an error when it’s broken, meaning that players can be staring at their screen for minutes to no avail

Pokémon GO became the most popular free app on the iTunes store almost immediately after it was released in Australia (Getty)

Pokemon Go is down again. But that’s not news.

The app is experiencing its latest wave of outages – this time apparently prompted by the release of the game in Japan. It has struggled to stay up ever since it was launched, with servers becoming overloaded because of the huge amount of interest in the game.

But some helpful developers have created a tool that makes it easy to see whether the app is down and so whether it’s worth struggling through its long loading screens to get online. The app is also useful for deciding whether it’s worth taking a trip out to hunt Pokemon – even if it is up at the moment, it tends to regularly go down, and so it offers a way of looking whether the app has been breaking recently.

The new site – IsPokemonGoDownOrNot.Com – functions as a status page for the app, automatically testing to see whether it’s still up.

The site works using an automated account that tries to log in every 30 seconds. It measures the time that it takes for each of those logins to happen – if it’s more than 15 seconds long, it’s likely that the app is either down or about to fall over. It also measures the speed of the server’s response, with anything longer than three seconds likely indicating that something is about to break.

Pokemon Go has been breaking ever since it was launched – apparently because of a combination of more interest than developers can cope with as well as attacks on the app. The company has been staggering the release of the game internationally to try and keep the load down, but that doesn't seem to have worked.