This post was originally published on Mashable.

An exploit in World of Warcraft allowed hackers to kill thousands of characters in the game's major cities over the weekend.

YouTube videos and screenshots surfaced of thousands of players and non-player characters dying in the populated towns of Stormwind and Orgrimmar on Sunday morning.

According to Eurogamer, the hacker posted that they had found "a kill hack" that allowed level 1 characters to bring down everyone around them without even attacking.

"We didn't do any permanent damage. Some people liked it for a new topic of conversation and a funny stream to watch, and some people didn't. The people who didn't should be blaming Blizzard for not fixing it faster (four hours of obvious use is sad), Eurogamer reports the unknown hacker said.

"It's not like I added 20,000,000 gold to everyone's inventory and broke the economy, but look at the big Chinese gold seller companies who are doing this every day. Now ask yourself who is really ruining the game. It's not. That's my justification."

Blizzard community manager Nethaera said on the World of Warcraft community forums that the exploit had been "hotfixed" and "should not be repeatable."

The newest World of Warcraft expansion came out two weeks ago, and the popular massively multiplayer game still has about 10 million subscribers worldwide. Nethaera urged players to keep playing, saying, "It's safe to continue playing and adventuring in major cities and elsewhere in Azeroth."

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