Since yesterday (December 5th) when I tab out more often than not when I tab back to WoW it’s frozen for a good 20-30 seconds.
I use Windows 11 and my drivers are up to date.
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You may have too many system resources being used at once and Windows is not able to pull WoW back up out of memory fast enough. Make sure your drives have 20% free space, you have available RAM, and that all apps that can use hardware acceleration (Discord, Bnet, Chrome, etc.) are not running at once. And not sure if it’s relevant, but you won’t want WoW installed on an external drive or one using exFAT formatting (NTFS is required).
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I have way more than 20% free space, and alot of RAM. Only thing aside from Bnet that I usually run with WoW is opening up Chrome if I need to look something up on WoWhead.
Nothing has change with my setup in a year and it’s been working perfectly fine since yesterday. I’ll probably open up my PC tomorrow and give it a good dusting and see if that helps. Just strange that it started yesterday.
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So you’re not updating your GPU drivers or Windows??
Well aside from drivers, windows etc. I just mean no new hardware or OS.
Our whole family is having this issue since 12/7. It happens several times an hour whether we are all on or just one of us. It is not an internet issue, nor Ram, nor Hard drive space, and drivers haven’t been changed (they’re all updated). One of the computers is only a month old gaming computer with tons of RAM and lots of space on SATA hard drive. Windows only open in background for Wowhead use. It’s a nightmare as Delves keep freezing and killing us.
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Let me know if something works, I’m still having the issues.
Though with our luck it’s probably something Windows did in a recent update a few days ago 
Now I’m stuck in a delve, dead and it won’t let me resurrect even though I have one more life. Quitting doesn’t help. Logout doesn’t help. No pop up to release spirit. This is with my character Taethedis. Finally after about 10 minutes it gave me the release spirit button, so I exited the delve and restarted. Got my first crash on the first section again, but at least I wasn’t in battle.
I started experiencing this after updating Windows and the graphics card driver. I reinstalled the driver and installed an older version, but I think it’s because of the new Windows update.
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Same thing is happening to me and it just start a few days ago. When I’m tabbed out and tab back in it freezes and a get the little spinning wheel in the center. When it unfreezes I see like what you see under Stormwind. Those brown hills in the unfinished areas. That last for a second and then I’m back to the game.
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OK, ours appears to be mostly our ISP running at about 1/3 speed. They fixed it today and it’s finally running fine. But seems to me WoW could do better with the interface when an ISP slows, rather than continuing to play in the background while nothing is getting through, leading to multiple deaths in battles.
No, I’m still having this issue.
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I think this is from the last windows 11 update. I am getting freezes of 20-25 seconds.
I’ll try to remove the last windows update and see if that fixes it.
Update - It fixed it…no issues by rolling back the last Win 11 update.
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What’s wrong with having WoW installed on an external drive? I thought that would be more beneficial
Most external drives use a format that WoW does not support (NTFS is supported, exFAT is not). Additionally, you’re throttled by the speed of the drive itself, the USB port, and the pathway through the motherboard. External drives are best suited for media files and backups, not programs you’re actively running.
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Same Problem for me, Win11 all Updates including Nvidia 566.36. Hope for a fix 
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I am the same as the previous folks.
I have just recently started freezing when I tab out to browse the web.
At first I thought it may of been an addon but I renamed 3 files to old and restarted the game with no addons installed but after about 30 mins I froze up.
Same issue after the windows update. I saw in a different thread that you can change the wow settings Graphics > Max Background FPS so it matches the other two fps settings. I disabled all three of those and it seemed to improve, not as frequent (80% repro down to 20%) nor as long (20-30 sec down to 2-3 sec). Although improved, the issue itself persists. Hope this helps!
I just installed Windows 10, the problem is gone.
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