World of Warcraft servers struggling under Battle for Azeroth pre-order demands (update)

World of Warcraft players eager to purchase Battle for Azeroth, the game’s seventh expansion, have been hit with a multitude of server issues when logging in. Players have reported issues on the game’s subreddit and Twitter, saying they’re being greeted with a black screen upon logging in, as well as pre-purchase problems, which Polygon was able to replicate.

Players were experiencing issues when trying to purchase the expansion itself, which would give them access to new Allied Races and a level 110 character boost. Blizzard quickly reacted by pushing a statement to the Battle.net client.

Players may encounter problems while attempting to make purchases. We are working with our third party payment processor to resolve the issue as soon as possible and apologize for the inconvenience.

Please follow @BlizzardCS on Twitter for further updates.

However, now it seems that the World of Warcraft servers themselves have gone down. When logging in, players have found that their existing characters don’t actually show up. WoW usually boosts the servers that players have characters on to the top of the list, but no characters are currently appearing. Trying to log in to one of the servers results in a black screen.

Blizzard Entertainment

Blizzard’s customer service Twitter account posted that the team is working hard to fix this issue. A later tweet clarified that it’s still occurring.

Update: Blizzard is still working on a fix. Its customer service twitter account has posted that they are actively working on a fix.

Another tweet, posted shortly after, announced that World of Warcraft would undergo maintenance early tomorrow morning.

We'll continue to update this story as Blizzard resolves the log-in issue.