Nintendo's highly-acclaimed augmented-reality game 'Pokemon GO' has been in the limelight for more than three weeks after its initial rollout in the US, New Zealand and Australia, which was followed by the massive European release for a total of 36 countries across the globe including Japan.
The game was recently launched in France and Hong Kong where the game servers have been confirmed to be stable in the last 48 hours. With servers already being overloaded with players who are using location spoofing methods ahead of the official release in their country, Niantic and Nintendo have decidedly geo-blocked several regions in Asia including India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Maldives, Nepal and major parts of China.
Meanwhile, the Pokemon GO release in Singapore seems to be imminent after the local government announced its plans to issue fresh guidelines based on the ongoing analysis and survey on the impact of the game in the country.
A fake announcement via Twitter handle @PokemonGO_SG had recently suggested that the new AR game would release in the country on 25 July. Later, a bunch of Redditors from Singapore clarified that it was a fake account being used by some pranksters.
Hong Kong servers are reportedly down for people playing with Pokemon Trainer Club login, while Google login seems to be working fine as of early morning on 26 July.
Geo-block Status Update
Several Asian countries seem to have been geo-blocked in the last few days including major parts of northern and western India as a bunch of players from Uttar Pradesh (Agra), Madhya Pradesh (Jabalpur), Karnataka (Dharwad and Mangaluru), Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat (Ahmedabad) have confirmed the server outage since Friday.
The game server was reportedly accessible in several other Asian countries including Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Brunei, Hong Kong, Korea, Thailand, Philippines and Cambodia while players reportedly complained of empty maps and no Pokemons in the region, according to Reddit thread 'Pokemon GO Release Status – Asia'.
It is confirmed that the geo-block has been lifted in some parts of Sri Lanka, China (Liaoning and Xinjiang), Indonesia (Jayapura and Papua), Nepal (Butwal and Nepalgunj) as reported by the locals in the Reddit's comment section.
As per the latest live update from the game servers, Pokemon GO is still not accessible across major parts of Central India and South India (including Bengaluru and Chennai).
Geo-block has been reported in two places in Bangladesh: Dhaka and Chittagong.
Some parts of Indonesia including south of Sumatra, all areas from west of Java Island to Lombok Island and all regions in south of Kalimantan and Sorong (West Papua) have been exempted from the geo-block.
The game is still inaccessible in Maldive's capital city 'Male' while several southern parts of the country have access to the game server.
With the exception of Butwal and Nepalgunj, the rest of the regions in Nepal have been reportedly geo-blocked from the last few days.
Meanwhile, several Pokemon GO fans in China have resorted to location spoofing and VPN hacks to bypass the restriction enforced by its government on accessing Google Maps and other GPS services on their devices.
The worldwide server status is currently reading "unstable" as of writing this update for Google login while the Pokemon Trainer Club account has been online for the past 7 hours. Check out the real-time game-server status and Uptime using this website.
