No one on the WoW team that I’ve talked to this afternoon can remember a maintenance that took this long. It looks like that’s because we’ve never done anything like this in World of Warcraft, where we’re basically turning one game into two games and we need every player-character in both games to be perfectly playable as they all were just before maintenance started.
Please know this: there’s a good reason for how long it’s taking, and our live operations team are making solid progress toward a resolution.
There are jobs that copy data and jobs that check the integrity of data and there’s an immense amount of data to process before we even begin the steps that we take to check everything manually. It’s not possible for us to lose anything, but it is possible for us to have an issue that requires a step to be repeated. In today’s case, the step we had to start over was a big one. While performing data integrity checks on the Burning Crusade Classic and Classic Era realms, we discovered an unfortunate issue with all player mail. The nature of the issue necessitated that we restore the portion of the database that contains that information in order to ensure nothing is lost. We’ve been in progress on this restoration for quite some time, but as you can imagine, it’s a huge amount of information.
We apologize for the delay in getting you back into Azeroth. We’re pretty sure we’ll be done in a few hours. It’s impossible to know with certainty, but our understanding of how long it’s going to take is coming into focus.