January 20, 2005 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Players of the online game World of Warcraft were unable to connect over the long weekend as roughly 20 of the 88 servers involved in hosting the popular game reportedly crashed, leading to a flood of message board and blog posts by irate gamers.
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Over the weekend, players reported long waits to connect to the servers, with some unable to connect at all. On Sunday, the game’s developer Blizzard Entertainment said it would take the affected servers offline for emergency service.
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In a posting on the game’s official Web site, the company said it had transferred data from its launch servers to some of its newer servers in an effort to improve performance.
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“The hardware update and data transfer was intended to split the load among multiple servers, which would in turn improve performance across the servers involved,” said the post, made on Tuesday.
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Blizzard said it would provide a 48-hour extension to user accounts as a means of compensation. World of Warcraft players pay a monthly subscription fee for access to the servers.
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The server failure reportedly came just a few days after a full-day system-wide shutdown carried out by the company on Thursday, January 13, in order to deal with performance issues.
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Since the server failure, Blizzard has temporarily imposed a queuing system in order to limit server load.
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In August of 2004, theWHIR reported that hosting for the very large World of Warcraft project would be provided by AT&T.
