Why are the hardcore servers the only servers down right now

We have many more steps to take with Hardcore during a full patch update like this one. Those steps are all focused on finding any issue that has even a remote chance of causing players to die. If we find such an issue, we go through a whole process of understanding it, reproducing it, designing a fix, testing the fix, and applying the fix before we open Hardcore realms publicly.

Issues like that can be safely tolerated on the non-Hardcore Classic Era realms for a little while, and of course, we apply our fixes to Classic Era realms as well as Hardcore realms as we go.

We appreciate your patience.