It’s a long Tuesday WoW maintenance for almost everybody, but all servers are now back online

It’s a weird week for WoW maintenance, with extended downtime for modern and Classic realms, while Mists of Pandaria Classic is the odd one out with only a single hour of maintenance. With TWW servers scheduled to be offline for four hours and WoW Classic servers scheduled to be offline for eight hours, it’s a long day of downtime for a lot of players. While Classic servers came back up earlier than expected, The War Within maintenance kept getting extended and lasted a full eight hours.

Here’s the WoW maintenance schedule for Tuesday, October 21:

• The War Within: Offline from 7am – 11am 12pm 1pm 2pm 3pm pacific (10am – 2pm  3pm 4pm 5pm 6pm eastern)
• Mists of Pandaria 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)

All World of Warcraft servers are now back online!

This is an odd week because there’s not much rolling out (that we know of) that would seem to require such extended downtime — and Blizzard rarely gives specifics on why servers are offline. For TWW, it’s possible Blizzard needs extra time to address buggy behavior in Legion Remix, plus a new phase is rolling out that adds the Suramar campaign, the Nighthold raid, and the Return to Karazhan dungeon. It’s not a mountain of content, but I can see that requiring a little extra downtime… apparently a lot of extra downtime considering the maintenance that was scheduled for four hours stretched to eight.

However nothing has been announced for the Classic realms; during today’s eight-hour maintenance we don’t expect any new content, and it’s odd to have such long downtime without some known reason. The next big content launch expected for the original Classic servers is likely to be The Burning Crusade coming to Anniversary realms. We know the expansion is coming — Anniversary servers just launched their final vanilla update, which added Naxxramas to the game — Blizzard hasn’t announced when it might arrive. We’re speculating early December, but that’s still quite a way away. Could it be possible other surprises are coming to Classic, or did the realms just need a little extra TLC this week? The servers came back online without any patch notes or obvious changes, though many addons have broken so be ready to deal with that.

Regardless of the why, we have some downtime ahead of us. (Which we could all use as an excuse to catch up on Mists of Pandaria.) When it’s maintenance day, there’s very little to do but wait (and maybe watch some cute pumpkin videos while you’re at it).

All servers are now back online, so I’ll see you in Azeroth soon.