It’s a good day to be a Pokémon. For once the streets are relatively quiet and the chances of being stuffed into a tiny ball and forced into brutal fights are low. On the flipside, Pokémon GO players are not enjoying themselves. Many are firing up the app for their daily routine of training, evolving and battling to find that they can’t log on, with any attempt being met with a “failed to authenticate” error.
So, what’s going on?
The issue
Firstly this doesn’t seem to be affecting all players and appears to be linked to a log-on issue that may be affecting multiple games:
Many users on r/PokémonGO are having similar issues, reporting that they’ve been “unable to open the game all morning”, that the game is stuck on the landing screen, and that reinstalling the game doesn’t fix the problem.
What’s the cause?
From our research, the common factor appears to be logging in using a Google account (though we’ve also seen talk of Facebook authentication issues). There may be some kind of server issue affecting Niantic at the moment, though as the official support for the company isn’t acknowledging players’ pleas for help even they might not know what’s causing this problem yet.
Pokémon GO last had the “failed to authenticate” error back in Nov. 2023, which was traced to McAfee software erroneously blocking the app from accessing the internet. There’s no indication it’s the same problem here, though we wouldn’t be surprised if it’s something in the same vein.
For now, as frustrating as it is, the solution is to sit tight and wait for Niantic to fix things. Here’s hoping that doesn’t take too long.