You’ve probably noticed an influx of people walking around aimlessly with their faces buried in their phones. Although you may think it’s just a new crop of annoying smartphone users, they are united in playing the latest app to craze the nation: Pokemon Go. Pokemon Go is an augmented reality game. It uses Google Maps to allow players to track and hunt Pokemon in real life. Certain public areas are “geo tagged” to be Pokestops and Pokegyms where players can earn freebies and battle other users. This application surpassed anyone’s expectations for the game. It is officially the fastest game to achieve 10 million downloads.
But we’re not here to give you all the latest tips and tricks for becoming a Pokemon Master. There’s a valuable IT lesson to be learned from Pokemon Go: Servers. Since it rolled out in America, Pokemon Go has experience FIVE critical server outages. Server issues have been so challenging the company who developed the app, Niantic, is putting the app’s release in Japan on hold. This $36.9 Billion dollar application can barely maintain its servers. So what can we learn from Niantic’s current problems?
- Proper Planning Prevents Poor PerformanceGiven Pokemon’s extreme popularity in the early 90s, Niantic should have been overly prepared for the influx of players ready to download the app and play the game. The app relies HEAVILY on continuous transmissions from the users phone to the host servers so all players can be updated in real time. This puts a huge strain on server traffic. Due to the lack of foresight into how popular this game would be, servers quickly crashed because they couldn’t support the traffic.
- Response TimeThe developers were left speechless with the volume of traffic and subsequent server crashes. There wasn’t a response team ready to address the critical failures. It took several hours (which is days in app time) to recover the servers. One outage lasted almost the entire afternoon on a Saturday. Luckily users are hooked on the game and many waited for the errors to be fixed. But some players were turned off by the lack of technical support and deleted the app. Always have a response team to call upon if something goes wrong with your IT. Even if you think you are safe, still know who to call if something goes wrong.
- Be TransparentPokemon Go is a free application to download. You are only required to spend money if you want to purchase extra items within the game. However, Niantic has been quiet about the recent server issues. They haven’t stated much about what they are doing to fix these critical issues besides that they are working on it. As server failures increase in frequency, players want answers or to at least be clued in to what is going on. Should you experience an IT issue, keep your clients and customers in the loop. They don’t need to know all the details but should know that you are aware of the problem, actively working to fix it, and have an end completion date in mind.
Pokemon Go is the newest augmented reality app to sweep the nation. As virtual reality and augmented reality grow in popularity, we will see more applications gain popularity. Hopefully, issues like servers crashing will become obsolete as developers prepare for the influx of traffic.
Are you prepared to handle traffic on your servers? Is there a layer of dust covering your server room? It may be time to evaluate the health of your current server operations. Contact Datasmith to determine your server’s life expectancy and ability to handle your business needs.
