OctoWoW opens Zul'Gurub after a month of DDoS attacks and says Blizzard tried to take its domain

OctoWoW, one of the servers that carried on with Turtle WoW's content after Turtle WoW closed in May, opened Phase 1 on 1 October 2026 at 08:00 UTC: Zul'Gurub is now available.

Raid schedule

Every phase opens at 08:00 UTC:

• Phase 1: Zul'Gurub, 1 October 2026
• Phase 2: Blackwing Lair, 5 November 2026
• Phase 3: Emerald Sanctum, 28 January
• Phase 4: Ahn'Qiraj, 18 March
• Phase 5: Timbermaw Hold, 29 April
• Phase 6: Naxxramas, 24 June
• Phase 7: Karazhan, 16 September

A month of DDoS attacks

OctoWoW has been under DDoS attack since late August. On 13 September the team said the attacks had grown from about eight hours a day to almost around the clock, and that it had signed up with its ninth DDoS protection provider. The realms moved to new hardware at its hosting provider, FlokiNet, on 19 September, while the custom traffic filtering was still being set up.

A domain dispute from Blizzard

In a post titled "Legal Action" on 8 September, OctoWoW said that the largest community-run Discord server for the game had been shut down after a legal threat against the people who ran it. OctoWoW says it has no control over community Discords, and it did not say who sent the threat.

In the same post, the team said that more than three months earlier FlokiNet had forwarded a domain name dispute filed by Blizzard to take control of OctoWoW's domain, and that FlokiNet did not act on it. Blizzard has not commented publicly.

Population

OctoWoW's census page showed 1,554 players online on the morning of 1 October across its N'Zoth, C'Thun and Y'Shaarj realms, with about 164,000 characters, 61% of them Alliance.

Sources: the OctoWoW roadmap, forum posts "Legal Action" (8 September), "DDoS 'Forever'" (13 September) and "Migration Maintenance Window" (18 September 2026), and the OctoWoW player census (1 October 2026).