What Happened to Team Rocket in Pokémon GO?

Team Rocket has always been something of a nebulous organization. Their stated goal is world conquest via the exploitation of Pokémon, but aside from genetically engineering Mewtwo, their activities never really seem to evolve beyond petty larceny and mild inconveniences. I guess Giovanni isn’t as competent of a mob boss as he looks; otherwise his organization wouldn’t just periodically fall apart. So, what exactly happened to Team Rocket in Pokémon GO?

Near the beginning of April, many players of Pokémon GO were submitting reports to Niantic about severe glitches when encountering Team Rocket grunts, either in their balloons or at PokéStops. According to an announcement from Niantic on April 9th, something in the game’s programming was going wacky in regards to Team Rocket spawns. In order to investigate this conundrum, Niantic temporarily disabled Team Rocket spawns entirely, and the grunts have been missing in action ever since. 

What Happened to Team Rocket in Pokémon GO?

The good news is that Niantic has confirmed that Team Rocket will be back to annoy everyone very soon. The bad news is that we still don’t know precisely how soon. According to Niantic’s reports, whatever is causing the Team Rocket-adjacent crashes and freezes is severe enough that it warrants a patch in the game’s next major update. However, it must be an especially virulent problem, as it’s been a good thirteen days since Rocket spawns were disabled. Some have theorized that Team Rocket spawns could be disabled into next month if Niantic doesn’t make an official statement soon.

Even when their patch is finally done, implementing it will likely be a bit of a headache; when the patch is ready, all players will be required to download it from their phone’s app store, and depending on the speed of your phone, this could take a little while. Since it’s such an important fix, you probably won’t be able to play the game until the update is downloaded and installed. Only once the game’s entire playerbase has the update will things be back to normal. 

With any luck, this’ll be behind us soon enough, and we can all start putting up with Team Rocket and their silly crimes once again.