It’s extended Tuesday maintenance for almost all World of Warcraft realms — all realms back online

It’s Tuesday, and every WoW player knows that means maintenance day. Maintenance for all Warcraft servers starts at the standard 7am pacific (10am eastern), but the end time will depend on which realm type you play on:

• WoW Classic realms (including Classic Era, Season of Discovery, and Anniversary realms) will be offline until 8am pacific (11am eastern) — now online!
• The War Within realms will be offline until 9am pacific (12pm eastern) — now online!
• Cataclysm Classic realms will be offline until 3pm pacific (6pm eastern) — now online!

All World of Warcraft servers are now available for play!

Cataclysm’s long maintenance is for the launch of Phase 4, the final stage of the expansion. This phase includes the Dragon Soul raid (opening on February 20) as well as a trio of end-game dungeons: End Time, Well of Eternity, and Hour of Twilight. That’s a lot to do, but we’ve seen Classic players grind through new content very quickly, and with Mists of Pandaria Classic not due out until summer, there’s likely to be a lull for Cataclysm players. But other Classic realms have a brisk content schedule for the year, and there will be plenty to do in Season of Discovery and the Anniversary realms when Dragon Soul is done.

The War Within’s downtime is a bit longer than usual, likely in preparation for next week’s launch of patch 11.1. While nothing new is happening this week, perhaps this will shave an hour off maintenance next week. (Even though that’s probably wishful thinking.) Enjoy today’s modest-sized maintenance, as I expect next week’s will be much lengthier — more like what we’re seeing in Cataclysm today. But that’s next week’s problem.

If you need something to help pass the time, and the myriad Classic realms aren’t doing it for you, our weekend game recommendations — though they did lean a little into romance — are still a great selection for killing the next few hours, and this week’s Epic Game Store freebie is F1 Manager — even if that isn’t usually your thing, it’s free right now. Or if you’d like to dive into a real rabbit hole, the whole team seems to be obsessed with Balatro and you could give it a try too. Just be warned: once you start playing, it’s apparently hard to stop.