The World of Warcraft servers suffered a significant outage lasting several hours in some realms after an “infrastructure change” was deployed incorrectly.
Players began reporting issues logging into the game around 1 PM ET on December 3, as many realms appeared offline and unavailable. The issue was not confined to one version of the game, with Retail and all flavors of Classic WoW succumbing to the problem.
They remained offline for nearly two hours in the US, with the EU servers returning online shortly after that. How this affected the Hardcore population, who had been logged in when the servers went down, is unclear at this time.
World of Warcraft developer shares details on the outage
In a thread on Twitter, Senior Game Producer for World of Warcraft, Tom Ellis, shared details on why the situation had arisen.
WoW got hammered by an infrastructure change with very unexpected results, we're working to get everything back up asap.
— Tom Ellis (@FwoiblesWoW) December 4, 2023
Ellis confirmed that a relatively minor update created all of the problems, saying: “The root of this one is an update to the teeny little service that bootstraps the VMs and delivers OS updates etc. Deployed fine in test, on Live, WoW did *not* approve and we locked up our file stores globally. We’re left with a lot of manual cleanup to get things moving again.”
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Many were quick to respond positively to the transparent breakdown, with one saying: “I know when these things happen, many details can’t be disclosed. I’m happy for a response that reflects the issue instead of a copy-pasted, inaccurate, time-wasting post.”
Another added: “Thank you so much for the update and the hard work! I will say, it was very funny getting a ‘Server shutdown 10 minutes’ message followed by ‘Server shutdown 10 seconds’ less than a minute later.”
The response from Blizzard has been widely lauded for its timeliness, even if some were critical of its occurrence in the first place. With more people playing their various World of Warcraft games than ever before, they will be keen to make sure it does not happen again.