Pokémon Home, Pokémon Champions and Pokémon Sleep are working again after roughly a day of emergency maintenance. Nintendo Life reports Champions came back first, at around 3am BST on 22 October, followed by Home. Sleep was a little later and ended its maintenance around 10am BST. If you couldn’t open any of them on Wednesday, it wasn’t your connection, and nothing on your end needed fixing.
Why the apps went dark
The trigger was a pair of critical flaws in PHP, the server-side language behind a large share of the web. Computer Weekly’s report says CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 each carry a 9.2 out of 10 severity rating and affect every release dating back to PHP 5 in 2004. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre warned that an attacker could trigger an out-of-memory condition that corrupts memory and, under certain conditions, achieve unauthenticated remote code execution. Cybersecurity agencies around the world warned organisations that couldn’t apply fixes in time to consider taking affected sites offline, which is what many did.
The Pokémon services followed that advice. According to OtakuKart, Pokémon’s support notice for the three services apologised for the disruption and gave no return time. OtakuKart adds that The Pokémon Company hasn’t explicitly confirmed the PHP flaws as the cause. The timing is hard to ignore, though. Miketendo64 points out that the Sleep notice used the phrase “system security measures”. Players saw the same pattern in the other two apps. As Nintendo Everything reported, Home showed a Japanese maintenance message, while Champions launched and then displayed an emergency maintenance warning.
What it cost players
Sleep took the biggest hit. According to Miketendo64, players couldn’t start new sleep tracking during the window, and sessions begun beforehand might not complete research properly. Pokémon GO Hub says the outage ran into a routine maintenance slot scheduled for 22 October, because the security fixes weren’t available before that planned maintenance was due. Many players hope for compensation, and premium items such as Good Camp Tickets and Expert Tickets lost 18 hours or more of use. Miketendo64 reports the Sleep notice says compensation is being considered and will be announced later. Pokémon GO Hub adds that Champions hadn’t announced any compensation on social media at the time of writing.
Home and Champions are linked, which made the overlap more disruptive for competitive players. Dexerto notes that Home stores and transfers Pokémon between compatible games, and Champions relies on it for some transfer features. Not every Pokémon title went down. Pokémon GO Hub says Pokémon GO wasn’t affected.
What to do now
We recommend a few quick checks rather than anything drastic:
- Update the apps from your store, and restart them if they still show a maintenance screen.
- Open Home and check that your boxes and any pending transfers look right, especially if you were moving Pokémon into Champions when the outage hit.
- Open Sleep and check whether your sleep research and tickets were affected. Compensation, if any, will appear through the app and the official Pokémon Sleep and Pokémon Champions accounts.
- Treat any email, DM or link that offers “compensation” or asks you to “verify your account” as suspect. Outages like this attract phishing.
- Avoid reusing your Pokémon account password on other sites, as with any account.
Anyone playing from the UAE, Saudi Arabia or Egypt should find the overnight restoration means services were back by the time the working day started, but the apps’ own status messages are the best check if something still looks stuck.
The wider PHP picture
Pokémon wasn’t alone. Game Rant lists Final Fantasy 14 and Umamusume: Pretty Derby among the online titles that underwent emergency maintenance for the same flaw. Outside gaming, Reuters, as carried by Emirates 24|7, reported government, school and hospital sites across Europe going offline. The Wikimedia Foundation also said it had taken down other systems as a precaution until they could be safely patched.
The clean-up may not be over for the wider web. Computer Weekly says the emergency patches cover only PHP 8.2 and newer, which leaves a long tail of older sites exposed. Sophos’s Don Smith told the BBC that the hard part is finding every place PHP is running, since it can sit beneath public websites, content management systems and third-party products. Smaller services you use could therefore still go down or lag behind on fixes. TheGamer noted the “undergoing maintenance” label was only partly accurate, since the games were offline while fixes rolled out for the security problems.
Is it safe to log back into Pokémon Home, Champions and Sleep?
The apps are working again, and Pokémon’s notices described emergency maintenance, with Sleep’s citing system security measures. We recommend updating the apps and watching the official accounts for any follow-up notice about accounts or data.
Will Pokémon Sleep players get compensation for the downtime?
Miketendo64 reports the Sleep notice says compensation is being considered and will be announced later. Nothing had been announced for Champions at the time Pokémon GO Hub published, so check the in-app notices and official social accounts.
Was Pokémon GO affected by the PHP outage?
No. Pokémon GO Hub says GO wasn’t hit, while Home, Champions and Sleep were the services taken offline.
