World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Classic's return to Outland will begin June 1, according to a Battle.net screenshot leaked this week.

The screenshot, which was posted on Reddit and discovered by Wowhead, reportedly notified many players of The Burning Crusade's launch date this summer. This coincides with existing news that the expansion will be released this year, following an ongoing beta.

The notice was quickly taken down, and although multiple variations of the image were discovered, it appears that no one was allowed into the post itself (the image disappears quickly with a refresh or scroll). While this could mean that the leak was a forgery, it is also possible that Blizzard released this news early.

Although released as an expansion to WoW Classic, The Burning Crusade will not completely replace the existing vanilla servers; players who wish to continue using Classic as is will be moved to the Classic-only realm, while existing servers Bold 2007 will move forward into the future. Blizz will also clone characters for a fee, allowing players to keep both the Classic and TBC versions of their favorite adventurers.

Prior to the opening of the Dark Portal, thousands of WoW Classic players have resumed level advancement from scratch in the sparsely populated realm. This is partly to allow new players to jump in ahead of the TBC, but also in an attempt to reboot a game that has become plagued by botters and an inflated economy.