Players in the World of Warcraft discovered an exploit that crashes the game's servers late Sunday, causing massive outages throughout the night.

The bug reportedly crashes the game's main world as well as all instances associated with the server, including its dungeons and battlegrounds.

Officially, Blizzard - the company behind WoW - has kept pretty mum on the exploit. From the WoW forum:

"We're aware of stability issues affecting select realms and are investigating. We'll provide an update to the situation as soon as additional information becomes available."

Blizzard spokesman Shon Damron gave us a little more dirt:

"Last night several realms did experience technical issues in regard to an exploit. This exploit was hot fixed within a couple of hours after it was discovered and the problem no longer exists."

Damron wouldn't specify what caused the bug, but we have since heard it may involve a problem with the user logging mechanism in the game's arena mode. We won't go into more detail because the internet already suffers enough entropy, thank you very much.

It's unknown whether Blizzard can track down those who took advantage of the exploit, but Damron suggested the company will investigate and might dole out punishments including suspensions and permanent bans if necessary.

While gamers certainly have attempted to exploit the massively popular game before, this appears to be the first time users could maliciously shut down the servers using an exploit. Such flaws hold a serious risk of frustrating users to the point of leaving the protection of their house and burning their skin in the harmful rays of the sun. ®

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