Some extra Friday maintenance is coming for World of Warcraft players (as a treat)

It’s Friday, and the World of Warcraft servers had some surprise maintenance this morning. Though it’s a little abrupt, this maintenance period was announced on the Battle.net launcher yesterday, so it’s officially planned maintenance… even if it’s not exactly when we expect WoW maintenance. This morning, the modern WoW and WoW Classic servers were offline for two hours. Here’s the schedule for today’s surprise maintenance:

• The War Within: Offline from 7am – 9am pacific (10am – 12pm eastern)
• WoW Classic (including Classic Era, Season of Discovery, Anniversary, and Hardcore realms): Offline from 7am – 8am pacific (10am – 12pm eastern)

The War Within and WoW Classic servers are back online!

There’s no news on what’s causing today’s downtime, but I wonder if it’s related to the string of DDoS attacks we’ve seen recently — though if that were the case, I’d expect downtime to hit all World of Warcraft servers, or perhaps go bigger and hit the authentication servers themselves. There’s no official announcement, so we can only hope the servers pop back online as planned without issue.

You could always hop into Cataclysm Classic in the meantime, but since Cataclysm isn’t really my thing, I can understand if you would rather pass. If you’re really itching to play something, you could kill some time checking out Cat Quest 2, which is free on the Epic Game Store this week. Even if a cat-based RPG wasn’t part of your plans for the day, you can’t beat the price.

I’ll let you know when the servers are back online, or if we hear anything else about today’s maintenance. See you in Azeroth soon, I hope!