The Lag Monster Lives

Well, tonight might have just set a new record for lag in WoW; on every server I was able to get on, the latency suddenly became horrendous right around prime-time, resulting in people getting stuck in loot-mode for minutes at a time, pets taking forever to appear when called (if they appeared at all), spikes that warped time forward untold moments, and all sorts of other issues. When I was finally booted off the server, I was greeted with my old friend the
"authenticating" screen...we've been catching up on old times for almost a half hour now.

Blizzard does have a message
on the official Realm Status forums that several realms are down to address problems, but some of the issues I mentioned were also seen on realms that are not on the list.

With the recent patch-to-patch-a-patch, everything had looked rosy for a few days; are we back to the dreaded post-holiday lag-fest? Did someone forget to feed the lag monster his sacrificial offering? Is millions of dollars in subscriptions per day not enough to run stable servers? Is this thing on? *tap*tap*