World of Warcraft is under a DDoS attack right now

Amid server instability tonight comes word from the official forums that WoW is under attack from hackers aiming to disrupt the game’s services. This attack appears to have been happening for at least a couple of hours now.

From the forums:

This isn’t the first time that WoW has been hit with a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, nor will it be the last. Previously massive attacks have knocked the game, and all of Battle.net, offline for a good chunk of time. So far compared to those continuous onslaughts this one seems relatively small, although it still is impacting many players in their prime time.

A DDoS attack happens when a large number of computers, under the control of a few criminals, are directed to talk to one particular server at the same time — in this case the WoW servers. If the attack is large enough it can knock the servers offline, overloading their network capacity and causing them to become dead to the world. There are various ways to combat these attacks as they happen; but combating it takes time.

We’ll update this post as we get more information in.

Update 1am CDT: The latest update from Blizzard says that they’re continuing to clean up things and are attempting to bring the severs back up that have been affected, however I wouldn’t hold my breath for normal gameplay tonight.

Update 1:20am CDT: This is the list of realms currently down:

Update 8:30am CDT: Blizzard last updated about 5am CDT that they’re still working on things (bringing up realms, but quickly noted that some other issues are related to this whole mess). In the time since that last update players are continuing to report either world servers being down outside of Draenor, or latency so bad that the game is unplayable. A message has appeared in the launcher warning players of technical issues; however it appears that the DDoS attack and/or the aftermath of it continues.