Thousands of players faced a Pokémon GO outage on Friday evening, and many were met with a Network Error 2 message when they tried to open the game or sign in. Down Detector showed the problem spreading fast, with over 6,000 reports early in the evening and more than 13,000 by 6:20pm EDT.
Down Detector and Pokémon GO
That volume points to a broad access problem rather than a single bad connection, because Down Detector splits reports across failed launches, login trouble, and server issues. Close to 62% of users said the game would not launch, about 23% said they could not log in, and about 13% pointed to server problems.
Scopely Explore Support said the team was working to resolve it as quickly as possible, and Scopely posted, "Trainers, we’re investigating an issue affecting Pokémon GO gameplay." For players, the immediate effect was simple: the game could fail before it even loaded, so the usual restart-and-retry routine was not a fix.
Some users said other apps were working well while Pokémon GO was showing the error, which points back to the game’s connection path rather than a general phone or network failure. Network Error 2 is described as a generic Network Error message that appears when the game struggles with server connection, and that matches the mix of launch, login, and server complaints.
Scopely and 8:30pm EDT
As of 8:30pm EDT, more than 7,000 players were still reporting issues, so the disruption had not cleared by the later evening check. Scopely also said, "Our team is working to resolve it as quickly as possible, and we’ll provide an update once it’s resolved. Thank you for your patience."
That leaves affected players waiting on one thing: a new update from Scopely on when the outage is actually resolved. With Pokémon GO serving a 60 to 75 million monthly active users base, even a short access failure can hit a large crowd at once.
