At 10:50 a.m. CST on May 9th, the World of Warcraft servers appear to be temporarily down. The game is currently unavailable due to technical difficulties. Blizzard’s game launcher, Battle.net, was also impacted. While Battle.net appears to be affected, the issue does not appear to affect other Activision Blizzard games. Only World of Warcraft servers are currently affected. Downdetector, a crowdsourced server status page, was used by players to report their problems.
This temporary login issue affects both World of Warcraft: Shadowlands and World of Warcraft: Classic servers. Players who attempt to log into World of Warcraft will get a “Retrieving Realm List” prompt for a few moment before being informed that they have been disconnected.
Players who are already logged into the game won’t be force logged out, so don’t be surprised if someone on your friends list is walking around Azeroth while you’re locked out. While World of Warcraft does not currently allow new logins, the servers are not completely shut down.
The issue may be the result of Blizzard’s pre-announced maintenance of the Battle.net app. Maintenance of World of Warcraft is scheduled for tomorrow.
Update May 9, 1:55pm CT: Battle.net maintenance has ended. World of Warcraft login servers should now be stable for all players.