‘Pokémon GO’ account failed to authenticate, explained

wegotthiscovered.com:

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

@NianticHelp Is there a current bug or issue with Niantic games and Android logins? I'm not able to log in to Pokemon Go, Pokemon Bloom, or Monster Hunter Now. The game just stalls out during log in for all three games. I'm still getting notifications from the games, however!

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?

@NianticHelp Can't log into Pokemon go with my google account. I can log into the web store no problem but not the game. Tried everything the automatic response sugested already, but there is no way to talk to a real person and solve this?

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.

@NianticHelp Can someone just acknowledge that there are login issues for some people in Pokemon Go. I have tried logging in for the past hour using Google and PTC and constantly get