The launch, the record and the two quotes from Holly Longdale and the Warcraft account are confirmed: they come from Blizzard's own article, forum and accounts. The server figures are Blizzard's too, but we could not open the original post on X and know it from the press quoting it, so they are reported.
Launch day
On 4 November Kaivax confirmed that Forever "launches simultaneously in all regions today at 3:00 p.m. PST" - 23:00 UTC, midnight on 5 November in central Europe, 10:00 a.m. on the 5th in Sydney. Maintenance had run since the morning, and the servers opened on time. Blizzard's article "World of Warcraft: Forever Now Live" went up at the same hour. It is the same article this site cited for the launch times; it was retitled when the game opened. In content it is a recap: more than 1,000 new quests, the Riverglades with more than 150 of them in the mid-30s to mid-40s, Zephras Isle for levels 1 to 12, the Skyborne, also called the shen'dorei or "hidden people", and the advice to start with the Enhanced preset when in doubt, because the preset screen only appears once.
The record
On 6 November the official Warcraft account wrote: "The biggest launch in WoW history by peak concurrent players. The highest number of returning players in WoW history." Holly Longdale, executive producer, added that Blizzard is seeing "the most NEW players for a WoW launch in 15 YEARS". Neither post gives a number, so the comparison cannot be checked from outside.
The hardware behind it
On launch night the Warcraft account listed what Forever runs on: 3,924 virtual machines, 251,136 GB of memory and 70,480 CPU cores. Longdale said the launch "was crazier than the insanity we imagined", but the team had built plans and contingencies. What went wrong in the first days is in our item on launch issues.
What this changes here
The whole site now treats Forever as a live game. The countdown on the front page is gone, the dungeon list says "open since launch" instead of measuring against the beta level cap, and the FAQ, timeline and topic pages speak of the beta in the past tense. Wherever a page has not been checked against the live game yet, it says so.