Crashes, lag, and total inaccessibility are just some of the problems players were experiencing last night. While many were quick to point the finger at Blizzard developers, it turns out that something more sinister was behind the instability many of us experienced. It has now been confirmed that hackers had taken aim at WoW, fully intending to disrupt services. Here is the blue post confirming the attacks last night:

It looks like our Network Technicians are actively working against a DDOS attack targeting our game services, which is why realms seems to be bouncing offline for a short time then reconnecting. Our best and brightest are on the case!

Thanks for the details, everyone. Keep 'em coming!

The attacks continued throughout the night and into this morning and affected at least 31 servers. It seems the attacks began sometime after midnight and continued well into this morning. At 5:00 AM CDT Blizzard posted this update:

We've brought all the WoW realms back online now, and are just waiting on some other critical services to spin up.

If you're getting World Server Down error messages, please try again in a few minutes.

Edit: I'm seeing reports that zones have no NPCs. This is very likely related, so please be patient (as you all have been...thank you!)

While servers are back up, it seems these attacks have left us with a host of problems. Players are reporting missing NPCs, certain zones down, high latency, buggy instances, and more. So if you are experiencing any of these problems, the culprit is likely leftover fallout from the attacks. For now all you can do is sit back and wait for things to get sorted out.

So what is a DDoS attack? DDoS stands for Denial of Service. These attacks come from one or more criminals who use a large number of computers to talk to a particular server at the same time. If the attack is large enough, it can knock the servers totally offline. There are many ways to combat these attacks, however, they take some time.

This attack, compared to previous ones seems to be relatively minor. However, this fact provides little consolation for players wishing to play during this most recent attack. Rumor has it that those behind the DDoS attacks assumed that the flying patch would be released on Tuesday, thus they launched the attack to disrupt the play of everyone logging on to enjoy the new patch. While we can't say for sure what the reasoning is for the timing of the attacks, we can say that they are likely to happen again. With no real way to predict when they will happen all we can do is sit back, wait, and trust that the Blizzard tech team will sort things out as quickly as possible.