A quick Wednesday morning WoW maintenance (we hope) to resolve bank issues (we hope) — servers are back online!

Wednesday is typically maintenance day for European realms, but this morning NA realms have an extra maintenance for Midnight realms. Fortunately it’s a quick one, with servers scheduled to be down for just an hour. Fortunately it was a quick one, and servers came back online in well under an hour.

Here’s the WoW maintenance schedule for Wednesday, February 18:

• Midnight: Offline from 7am – 8am pacific (10am – 11am eastern)

Today’s maintenance may be related to Warband bank problems in game. Over the weekend, Blizzard cut access to all players’ Warband banks without specifying why. This caused more than a little anxiety, since there have been bank mishaps in the past that resulted in permanently lost items, and we’ve been cramming a lot of stuff into those banks.

Blizzard re-enabled access to Warband banks on Tuesday evening for NA realms via a hotfix, and will re-enable them on EU realms with weekly maintenance. And while Blizzard hasn’t said this morning’s server maintenance is related to the bank issue, the timing makes it seem likely. Perhaps the servers needed a restart along with the hotfix, and Blizzard simply scheduled it for the morning rather than doing it during prime Tuesday evening gaming hours for NA players.

It looks like maintenance wasn’t much more than quick restart, and servers came back online quickly, with a small 400mb patch. Hopefully I’ll see you in Azeroth soon.