It’s a long World of Warcraft maintenance day for Midnight, and even longer for WoW Classic

We have an unusually long WoW maintenance day, with four hours of downtime scheduled for Midnight realms and a full eight hours of downtime scheduled for core Classic realms. But Mists of Pandaria Classic and The Burning Crusade Classic both have a quick hour of maintenance. Still, that’s a long day of maintenance for a lot of WoW players.

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

• Midnight: Offline from 7am – 11am pacific (10am – 2pm eastern)
• Mists of Pandaria Classic: Offline from 7am – 8am pacific (10am – 11am eastern)
• WoW Classic (including Classic Era, Season of Discovery, and Hardcore realms): Offline from 7am – 3pm pacific (10am – 6pm eastern)
• The Burning Crusade Classic Anniversary realms: Offline from 7am – 8am pacific (10am – 11am eastern)

The Burning Crusade, Mists of Pandaria, and Midnight servers are back online, but Classic servers remain offline.

Usually these longer maintenance periods mean new content, but there are no content patches scheduled to launch today, and we don’t even have release dates for upcoming patches. However, there are some changes hitting both Midnight and Classic realms this week… though the Midnight updates don’t seem large enough to require this maintenance.

A PVP balance patch will go live on Midnight servers with today’s maintenance, but it looks like a pretty small hotfix. It’s possible we’ll get news about additional updates after the servers come back online, but nothing has been announced in advance. For Classic, the changes are all under the hood, as Blizzard rolls out modern UI improvements to Classic realms. These changes went live in Burning Crusade Classic last week, and will go live for core Classic realms this week. TBC realms also had an eight hour maintenance the week before Blizzard flipped the switch on these UI changes, so there’s probably a lot going on behind the scenes, even though players aren’t getting new gameplay content.

There’s also a one-hour Blizzard Services maintenance scheduled for today, from 8am – 9am pacific (11am – 12pm eastern). While this maintenance doesn’t take the WoW servers offline, it can mean connectivity issues and Blizzard has announced that voice chat will be offline during this time. Both Midnight and core Classic realms will be offline anyway during this maintenance, but Mists of Pandaria and Burning Crusade players should be aware that you may see issues this morning during Blizzard Services maintenance.

Though I’m always hoping for a speedy maintenance, most of us are in for a long wait today. I’ll keep you up to date right here on the current WoW server status, and let you know when the servers come online — hopefully I’ll see you in Azeroth soon.