It’s an extra long WoW maintenance for everybody — but all realms are now back online!

Today’s World of Warcraft maintenance is an extremely unusual eight-hour downtime for all servers — modern, Classic, and Mists of Pandaria Classic. It’s not out of the ordinary for one of the three to be offline for a long maintenance when something new is launching, but all three of them being offline for a long maintenance at once is certainly odd. And it comes after two weeks of unusually long maintenance windows that didn’t coincide with any major content launches — plus it’s the second week in a row that Mists has been scheduled for an eight-hour maintenance (though it came up early last week).

So let’s get to the bad news: here’s the WoW maintenance schedule for Tuesday, November 4:

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

All servers are now live and ready to play!

Classic and Mists servers were back up around 1pm pacific (4pm eastern), so they came online early. The War Within servers — which also happen to be the Legion Remix servers — went up at around 2:30 pacific (5:30 pm eastern) time, so a little early too.

And I have even more bad news: in addition to the usual Tuesday maintenance, the Battle.net launcher is reporting that servers will also be offline on Wednesday from 10am – 11am pacific (1pm – 2pm eastern). It appears as if this maintenance is also for all variants of WoW (in that it shows up as a message on the launcher for all variants of WoW), but maintenance alerts in the launcher are typically light on details. We’ll have to wait and see what Wednesday brings.

So what exactly is going on?  Unfortunately Blizzard doesn’t typically explain why downtime (or extra downtime) is needed, though we can often assume it’s related to new content launches. This week Legion Remix is launching phase 3 (which includes the Broken Shore zone, Cathedral of Eternal Night dungeon, and Tomb of Sargeras raid), and when phase 2 launched the modern WoW servers were also down for eight hours (though they weren’t scheduled to be offline for that long). However, there’s no similar explanation for Classic or Mists Classic realms, and it’s unclear as to what’s happening behind the scenes.

But whether we understand it or not, we’re all in for eight hours of maintenance, so I hope you’re ready to entertain yourself today. If you’re at loose ends, I have some things that might chew up those empty hours:

• Watch videos of Mars the pygmy hippo practicing his passive resistance skills. If you reach the maximum number of times you can watch this video (I haven’t yet), go browse our Cute! category for more adorable animals.
• Did you know we do three podcasts a week? You could use this time to catch the latest Blizzard Watch, Lore Watch, and Tavern Watch podcasts, or check our list of all the TTRPGs we’ve played on Tavern Watch this year (quite a lot!).
• We have been talking a lot about indie games lately, particularly spooky indie games for the fall season. And, yes, even though it’s November I strongly believe you can still enjoy a spooky game. These dark days where the sun hits the horizon extra early are a perfect time to enjoy some frights. Check out these great indies you may have missed in October, our recommendations for spooky games to play on Halloween (or any time), the three creepy indies Anna highlighted last month (Vampire Therapist, The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow, and Saturnalia), or this week’s is week’s Epic Games Store freebies (Bendy and the Ink Machine and Five Nights at Freddy’s: Into The Pit). You could also try The Séance of Blake Manor, which has been occupying my time lately.
• Have you considered reading a book (or listening to a book)? I just updated our guide to every Warcraft novel in print.

That’s all I have for you. But I will keep you up to date with the latest news on WoW maintenance and let you know when servers are back online or if maintenance has been extended. (Hopefully it won’t be.) We could even get lucky and have a shorter than expected maintenance! I’ll keep my fingers crossed if you’ll do the same.

Hopefully I’ll be seeing you all in Azeroth soon.