My brother just received this from Technical Support at Blizzard
"Thanks for contacting Blizzard Technical Support, my name is Jon. If
when logging in, you hang on "Authenticating" or any other similar
connection problems, please wait 10-15 minutes and try again. In this
particular case the login server was experiencing difficulties. When
this occurs the game servers may still be up, so you may notice people
playing while you are not able to get in.
Occasionally servers will be taken down to update software or to make
changes or enhancements to the hardware. If we find any problems that
could contribute to server crashes, we will be taking action in order to
prevent this. If we are forced to take down a server, we will get it
back up and running as soon as possible. We appreciate your
understanding in this and we will be doing everything we can to ensure
that your World of Warcraft experience is enjoyable and fair.
I am sorry for any inconvenience that this may have caused you. This
problem should be a temporary problem with our servers and should be
fixed as soon as possible. When we do take the servers down, there will
be a post regarding the outage on our World of Warcraft server status
forum. https://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?forumId=11113
. This forum will also be updated when the issue has been resolved."
