'Pokemon Go' has been targeted by hackers.

Pokemon Go

Pokemon Go

Developer Niantic has revealed that the popular augmented reality mobile game has suffered a number of attempts from nefarious individuals and organisations who have tried to "bring down the service" but they are working hard to prevent them from being successful.

Niantic said in a blog post: "There are outright hackers out there attempting to break into systems, hijack social media accounts, and even bring down the service. Some of them have posted publicly about their attempts.

"We don't expect these attempts to stop. But we do want you to understand why we have taken the steps we have and why we will continue to take steps to maintain the stability and integrity of the game."

And after outcry from gamers, the company also revealed why it has blocked third-party apps such as Pokevision.

The post added: "Running a product like 'Pokémon GO' at scale is challenging. Those challenges have been amplified by third parties attempting to access our servers in various ways outside of the game itself.

"As some of you may have noticed we recently rolled out 'Pokémon GO' to Latin America including Brazil. We were very excited to finally be able to take this step. We were delayed in doing that due to aggressive efforts by third parties to access our servers outside of the 'Pokémon GO' game client and our terms of service. We blocked some more of those attempts yesterday.

" Since there has been some public discussion about this, we wanted to shed some more light on why we did this and why these seemingly innocuous sites and apps actually hurt our ability to deliver the game to new and existing players. The chart below shows the drop in server resources consumed when we blocked scrapers. Freeing those resources allowed us to proceed with the Latin America launch.

"In addition to hampering our ability to bring 'Pokémon GO' to new markets, dealing with this issue also has opportunity cost. Developers have to spend time controlling this problem vs. building new features. It's worth noting that some of the tools used to access servers to scrape data have also served as platforms for bots and cheating which negatively impact all Trainers. There is a range of motives here from blatant commercial ventures to enthusiastic fans but the negative impact on game resources is the same."