The announcement about problems with Warcraft’s provider was followed by a series of emergency maintenance outages for Warcraft realms. It’s not clear why “complications” at a third-party provider would be followed by server maintenance. While there has been no mention or indication of any malicious activity, there is a precedent for such attacks. Last year a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) attack targeted Final Fantasy XI, another large virtual world.

World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) based on Blizzard Entertainment’s Warcraft series depicting a war between four races with magical abilities and distinctive weapons.