Sometimes when I get disconnected and log back in, I wouldn’t be on the gryphon and fall from mid air.
happened once. i was in flight over wetlands and got dc’d (when the servers were being crae crae) - logged in mid-air and failing, luckily i bubbled and didn’t die, but gee golly i had a long run after this happened.
Yes last week, flying from Ironforge to Menthil Harbor… Dropped in an unused area, and it kept resetting… took me 30 mins to make it out of the area I had to jump down and kill my toon. To zone in Menthil.
I haven’t yet experienced this in Classic but I know it happened to me in WoD, Legion, and BFA and usually if I logged out while on a FP.
What I have seen is my Aquatic Form getting stripped while swimming at the surface (without jumping up). Super annoying but not game-breaking.
It happens if you DC or get really bad latency. I had it happen during the DDOS attacks and I ended up in the middle of the ocean
Yep, but it happened on the tail end of ddos weekend so I was not sure if the 2 were related.
It’s really not that hard to imagine. The game tracks your position and in what state (mounted/dismounted/flying/swiming etc.) sending it back and forth from you to the server. If you have a slow connection the game might not be able to sync properly, so the server thinks your aren’t in flight or something for a spilt second, so it dismounts you and you fall to your death.
That would imply that this stuff is calculated client-side and any idiot with some artmoney can manipulate it as they see fit.
Well, I’m sure they have the means to detect occasional random blips vs intentional manipulation… but it was just an example. Lag has always affected this game in interesting ways.
Me.
But I was lucky and didn’t die.
I’ve never seen this in WoW, but I remember seeing it in EQ2 at launch. Flight paths were a gamble. I remember waiting on a party member and we saw his bird disappear and him drop to the ground. We all asked in chat what happened and he replied “The bird just disappeared on me!”
Next time hold on tighter sometimes the skies can get turbulence. Your peggle score isnt worth your characters life 
Someone probably feared you while you were AFK.
And you can die again from fatigue as a spirit while hunting down your corpse in the middle of the ocean
I once logged out flying on that flight path. Next time I logged in on that character I was dead wherever I fell.
Servers are strained.
This is necro, but it just happened to me. I was flying towards IF and suddenly got Instance transfer aborted message, and fell to the snowy mountains south of Don Morogh.
I ran BRD half an hour before that, and was first to enter the dungeon, and wasn’t teleported when the group disbanded. So maybe it coincided with the dungeon instance reset due to inactivity. Crazy guess.