There are always people trying to ruin the fun for everyone, and the launch of World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor was sadly no exception. Blizzard has confirmed on Battle.net that the game has been hit by a DDoS attack, and that they been forced to act by temporarily lowering the maximum populations on servers. Blizzard writes:
Europe was our first region to launch, and we encountered a few issues due to the sheer number of players attempting to enter Draenor from a single location. We worked to add multiple new ways to access Draenor, and this helped ease some of the initial rush into the new expansion as players were able to access it from their capital cities, as well as from the shrines in Pandaria.
While that solution helped a ton for our North American launch, we ran into a few other issues, including a distributed denial of service attack, that resulted in increased latency.
To help correct for this and other issues, we've temporarily lowered maximum realm populations. This means there will be high queue times experienced on high-population realms.