The plight of live service games like World of Warcraft is that they can't always be up and running. Sometimes emergencies happen, but more often than not, downtime is due to regular maintenance.
Is WoW down?
At the time of this writing, all servers are currently online. There are no issues to report at the moment.
How to check if World of Warcraft is down
Checking if World of Warcraft servers can be done in many ways. One way is to log into the game itself to check the realm status. If you're away from your PC, you can also check Blizzard's site for the status of every realm. Checking the customer support Twitter is also a good way to get the maintenance schedule.
Related: Will Warcraft Arclight Rumble include World of Warcraft characters?
When is WoW down for maintenance?
Blizzard runs maintenance every Tuesday, generally from 10am ET to 11am ET. For the EU, this shifts to every Wednesday.
Season launches can run longer, as was the case for Dragonflight Season 2 where the servers went down from 10am ET to 2pm ET. Patch days can be even longer and maintenance running up to eight hours isn't unheard of. Sometimes there is unscheduled maintenance that can be done in case of an emergency, and that can happen at any time, but it's rare.
It's a necessary evil to ensure that the servers are running smoothly. Most companies, Blizzard included, will do their maintenance on Tuesdays, which partly owes to the phrase "Patch Tuesday." But, sometimes players can forget this, or maintenance gets extended, and we invariably begin to wonder if the game is down for unexpected reasons.
Companies will usually try to pick a less populated time to perform regular maintenance, so the least amount of players are impacted. But with live service games, there's always a going to be someone online that will be inconvenienced.
For more World of Warcraft goodies, check out What are the Dragonflights in WoW? – World of Warcraft lore, explained on Pro Game Guides.
Published: May 9, 2023 11:34 am