Update #3: Everything appears to have been resolved. If you’re still having issues, let us know in the comments section below.
Update #2: Things have gotten out of control, and Blizzard has deemed it necessary to take measures that may result in servers going down. Here’s the latest post by BlizzardCS:
We are currently testing possible resolutions across various realms. Some realms may be taken offline during this process.
Honestly, I would avoid doing Highmaul for the time being. Few things would be more infuriating than having a server outage during a boss attempt.
Update: Community Manager Josh Allen has updated players on the cause of server crashes. He posted the following on Twitter:
The number of Giant Lashers is crashing servers.
Giant Lashers are an add that spawns from Tarlna, one of the two new world bosses.
The latest post by BlizzardCS states that Blizzard is going to “continue to work on resolving ongoing connection/latency issues”. A direct cause has not been confirmed, but DDoS charts show a storm of packets hitting Battle.net that originate from China.
Original Story: Today was supposed to be an overwhelmingly fun day for World of Warcraft fans. Not only has Highmaul (Warlords of Draenor‘s first raid) arrived, but so have two huge world bosses and a new PvP season. Unfortunately, things didn’t go according to plan.
World of Warcraft maintenance was supposed to end at around 11:00AM PST, but was delayed twice, eventually landing on 3:00PM PST. Once Blizzard opened the gates, the servers were devastated by both demand from users and a DDoS attack from proxies in China. You can see the attacks for yourself on Digital Attack Map.
It appears Lizard Squad is behind the madness, making this its second successful attack in two days. Yesterday, it caused temporary destruction of Xbox Live’s service, leading to thousands of frustrated new Xbox One owners who purchased the console during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Also See: Top 5 Video Game Launch Disasters of 2014
Lizard Squad has threatened with more attacks planned for the holidays, in addition to stating in its last Tweet: “Who’s next?”. We can only hope that service providers are able to reinforce their systems enough to defend against the onslaught of packets sent from script kiddies.
For now, thousands of avid World of Warcraft fans fight to login so that they can tend to their Garrison, and try out the latest PvE and PvE content.
