It’s maintenance day at Blizzard Entertainment, and the WoW servers are back online — but there’s more maintenance scheduled for this afternoon

It’s Tuesday (again), which means it’s time for some WoW maintenance (again). But I have some happy Tuesday news for you, because the World of Warcraft servers are now back online, coming up a full 40 minutes ahead of schedule. This includes all iterations of WoW: modern, Classic, and Cataclysm Classic.

Today’s two hour maintenance is a little longer than the usual one hour cycle (even with the early ending), but with the servers seeming troubled lately maybe a little extra maintenance is due. In the past week we’ve seen a slew of problems in modern WoW, including unusual lag and disconnects in Nerub’ar Palace, phasing problems throughout Khaz Algar, failed portals and teleports (including very vanilla fatigue deaths when a teleport drops you in the middle of the ocean), and issues with Warband currency transfers (which led to them being disabled). Cataclysm Classic has had its own problems, with guild bank tabs showing up empty even when they were populated, causing issues when players put things in slots that actually had things in them. That’s been fixed, but a hotfix will go live during maintenance to fix those potential item overlaps.

But the 7am to 9am downtime is only the first round of maintenance for the day. From 11am to 12pm pacific Diablo 3 and Blizzard Services will be offline for maintenance, and Hearthstone will have a brief maintenance while its new expansion, The Great Dark Beyond, rolls out. Hearthstone’s maintenance shouldn’t be more than a blip, but expect to download a patch and restart your client around midday.

Blizzard Services maintenance is a little unusual, and this off-schedule time feels more unusual — but I’d rather have maintenance than server problems. While the World of Warcraft servers are up, Blizzard Services maintenance means players could have “interruptions of service,” like disconnects or login issues across all Blizzard games. We’ll have to wait and see how this affects gameplay in the afternoon. I’ll update this post with server status as we learn more.

In the meanwhile, if you aren’t hopping on to immediately check your vault, might I recommend a good book? I have been enjoying the Murderbot series myself lately, and the short novellas are a great way to distract yourself from the real world while waiting for the servers to come online.