World of Warcraft has over 10 million subscribers, of those around half are from China. Or at least they were. The Chinese government has been implementing new internet restrictions and WoW is one of the unfortunate websites that got the boot.

Blizzard, the company who runs WoW, recently changed over the company operating WoW in China from The9 to NetEase. However this has caused some problems. It was thought that WoW would be up an running in China by the end of June, but as you can tell this hasn’t happened. Something must have gone wrong in negotiations.

Speculation blames an investigation into the partnership between Blizzard and NetEase by the Chinese government. They say that they have suspended WoW in China because of a possible illegal joint venture between the two companies.

What ever the reason for the indefinite ban on World of Warcraft in China, the Chinese government is going to be dealing with about 5 million very angry WoW subscribers jonesing for their online life. I wonder how long the government is going to be able to keep WoW down… Maybe Blizzard didn’t pass along a large enough paper bag.