Corrupted Blood incident

The Corrupted Blood incident (also known as the World of Warcraft pandemic) took place between September 13 and October 8, 2005, in World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) developed by Blizzard Entertainment. When participating in a boss battle at the end of a raid, player characters would become infected with a debuff that was transmitted between characters in close proximity. While developers intended to keep the effects of the debuff in the boss's game region, a programming oversight soon led to an in-game pandemic throughout the fictional world of Azeroth.

This article is about the virtual plague. For the legal concept of "corruption of blood", see Attainder ยง Corruption of blood.

World of Warcraft introduced the game region of Zul'Gurub on September 13. The boss of the region, Hakkar the Soulflayer, cast Corrupted Blood on raid participants; the debuff's effects expired when players defeated Hakkar. Corrupted Blood soon spread beyond Zul'Gurub as players reacted to the infection with panic, either fast traveling to heavily-populated game regions or deactivating their animal companions. When those companions were reactivated, they still carried the debuff, becoming disease vectors, while non-player characters became asymptomatic carriers. Player reactions to the Corrupted Blood pandemic varied: some provided aid by healing players or warning them of outbreak zones, while griefers intentionally contracted the debuff to spread it across the game world. After several failed hotfixes, Blizzard ended the pandemic by performing a hard reset, and a later patch prevented companions from contracting Corrupted Blood entirely.

Although it was the result of a software bug, the Corrupted Blood incident gained attention from World of Warcraft players and disease researchers. Blizzard developed intentional in-game pandemics in two expansion sets: Wrath of the Lich King in 2008 and Shadowlands in 2020. Epidemiologists, meanwhile, took interest in how MMORPGs, unlike mathematical models, could capture individual human responses to disease outbreaks rather than generating assumptions about behavior.

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