A long Tuesday maintenance precedes The War Within patch 11.1 — servers now back online, but expect stability problems

Tuesday always means maintenance day for World of Warcraft fans, but today is a big one because The War Within patch 11.1 is rolling out. The first major patch of an expansion is always an exciting one, and this one is more so because we’re headed to Undermine, home of the Goblins. It’s a place we’ve heard about before, but this is our first chance to explore it — and, hopefully, liberate it from the rule of Gallywix in the Liberation of Undermine raid opening next week. But all of this excitement does make for a long maintenance.

Today The War Within servers will be down for a full eight hours, while the WoW Classic realms will only have a quick one hour maintenance. Here’s the exact times for today’s maintenance:

• The War Within servers will be offline from 7am – 3pm pacific (10am – 6pm eastern)
• WoW Classic servers (including Classic Era, Cataclysm Classic, Season of Discovery, Anniversary, and Hardcore) will be offline from 7am – 8am pacific (10am – 11am eastern)

All WoW servers are back online, as scheduled, though I can report some stability problems. Blizzard says the authentication servers are having problems, so you may have trouble getting online (and it’s up in the air whether you’ll stay online if you do). As always, expect some UI issues post-patch and be sure to update your addons before logging on (and be prepared to turn them off if they don’t work).

While Classic players will be more or less free to go about their gaming as normal, players on modern realms will have to find a way to kill most of the day, but fortunately the servers came back online on time, without any extra delays. Still, if you need a distraction from the world (of Warcraft or otherwise), our weekly game recommendations are a good place to start looking for new games — including the latest RPG sensation, Avowed (which is currently free on GamePass). Steam NextFest has also just begun, which means Steam is packed with great new game demos to try — we’ll have an article about our favorites soon, but for now there’s plenty to browse. If today’s maintenance goes late, you may have time to check out other games, so browsing is an ideal downtime activity.

All WoW servers are now online, but with the authentication servers having problems you may not be able to get online. Expect instability if you play tonight (and maybe don’t try to do any serious content tonight).