World of Warcraft Servers Down as Blizzard Confirms DDoS Attack After Warlords of Draenor Release

World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor — Artwork for the Warlords of Draenor expansion pack. Blizzard

World of Warcraft's North American servers have suffered a DDoS attack, Blizzard has confirmed.

"We ran into a few other issues [in NA]," community manager Bashiok explained on the WoW Forum, "including a distributed denial of service attack, that resulted in increased latency."

The attack has hit following the worldwide release of Warlords of Draenor, the latest expansion pack for the massively multiplayer online game (MMO).

Blizzard have confirmed that server maintenance will take place on North American servers from 5am PST (1pm GMT) for roughly four hours in an attempt to fix the problem.

WoW Insider believes the attack originated from China, posting an image showing the apparent origins of the DDoS.

European servers have experienced some latency under the pressure of the new release, which has resulted in caps on player numbers and server queues last night. As of now the problems are tiny compared to those being suffered across the pond.

Warlords of Draenor is the first World of Warcraft expansion since 2012's Mists of Pandaria. Subscriptions for the MMO rose to 7.4 million in anticipation of the expansions release.

The expansion also marks a rise in subscription costs for the decade-old game. Players with active subscriptions will pay the old price for as long as their subs continue, but new players will pay the following (original pricing in brackets).