Exploit Crashing WoW's Servers Discovered!

A piece I just happened to stumble upon, posted on Theregister.co says that "Players in the World of Warcraft discovered an exploit that crashes the game's servers late Sunday, causing massive outages throughout the night." Blizzard is awfully quiet on this one, but has made a few statements just so they'd give the impression that they're on top of the issue.

"The bug reportedly crashes the game's main world as well as all instances associated with the server, including its dungeons and battlegrounds," writes Austin Modine up on the mentioned source. Here's what they found up on 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," stated Blizzard spokesman Shon Damron. He continued assuring the 9 million subscribers of the popular MMO that the bug was fixed within a couple of hours:

"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." However, as the same forum shows (or better yet, doesn't show), Blizzard failed to to specify what exactly caused the respective bug, but the source has "since heard it may involve a problem with the user logging mechanism in the game's arena mode." Of course, this issue remains wide open for debate.

However, if you're one of the "lucky" users of the exploit, the same spokesman implied that the company will be carrying out an investigation to see who used it and who didn't, issuing suspensions and even permanent bans if the case asks for it.

Oh and just so everyone knows, this seems to be the first time when subscribers were able to shut down the servers using an exploit. It begs the question: What's next?