"We'd like to make all players aware that at this time our Internet service provider is experiencing significant complications, and as a result the playability on a large portion of realms has been adversely affected," says a message from Epifanio senior game master on the WoW forums. "Symptoms include but are not limited to lag, random disconnections and slow authentication. Our network technicians are doing everything in their power to work with our ISP so that this issue may be resolved as swiftly as possible."

World of Warcraft is hosted by AT&T (att.com), which houses servers for the game at data centers in Los Angeles and Redwood City, California, and Ashburn, Virginia. The outages affected both the worldofwarcraft.com Web site and game servers.
 
The announcement about problems with Warcraft's provider was followed by a series of emergency maintenance outages for Warcraft realms, although it is unclear as to why "complications" at a third-party provider would be followed by server maintenance. Although no malicious activity has yet been reported, such attacks are highly plausible. Last year, a distributed denial of service attack targeted the multiplayer game Final Fantasy XI.