WotLK all my characters have been deleted after a 6 month break?

[twinkmorro]

just logged into my twink account to show my friend my accounts and all my characters have been deleted apart from one level 80?

it hasn't even been that long since I logged into them I only quit for 6 months to maybe a year due to the 2fa making it a pain to login and all my characters get wiped?

so i wasted months building characters for each bracket dumping thousands of gold into them and grinding items for you to wipe them because I didn't log in for a few months, sick game :/

is there any way to recover or get the characters back?

[Repost]

Could they have been subjected to this?