All WoW servers are back online, with Season of Discovery realms coming back up (very) early!

It’s Tuesday, which means it’s maintenance day for World of Warcraft realms in North America and Australia. Today’s maintenance is a short one hour of downtime for The War Within and Cataclysm Classic, but other Classic players have a long eight hour maintenance ahead of them.

All WoW servers are now online. WoW Classic realms came up several hours early and are available for play as of around 12pm pacific (3pm eastern). That’s much speedier than anticipated!

Here’s this week’s maintenance schedule:

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

This lengthy downtime is likely due to the rollout of Season of Discovery’s surprise Phase 8, which goes live when the servers come back up. Unfortunately, even though only Season of Discovery is getting new content today, all Classic-related realms are marked as being offline for maintenance as well — though I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the other realms came up a bit earlier than Season of Discovery itself. But don’t take that as a promise: only Blizzard knows how long maintenance will take.

Once Season of Discovery is online and stable, the all new Scarlet Enclave raid will launch on April 10. This isn’t the first time Blizzard has taken Season of Discovery to brand new places, but the scope of new content in this patch is surprising (in a good way). We look forward to exploring everything new in Phase 8!

For TWW and Cataclysm players, this maintenance was blink-and-you’ll-miss-it fast (where did that hour go?), and the servers are back online. And while Classic players had a longer-than-normal maintenance, the servers came back online extremely early. You only had time to listen to Blizzard’s tavern music video four or five times!

All WoW servers are back online, so I’ll see you in Azeroth!