This was outlined in the article, in the section subtitled “BANG A GONG!”.
Pagle was patient zero for the issue described there. Pagle was the first to experience an unexpected server restart during the War, and of course Murphy’s Law for time of day also kicked in, with the issue becoming apparent for our engineers in the middle of the night.
My personal WoW Classic characters are on Pagle, and in true dadserver fashion, I’m already referring to it as the 40-hour war. I’ll soon be telling the story about how we had the 50-hour war uphill both ways, in the snow. In Silithus.