Xbox users have spent the last few hours cut off from the platform’s online features after a major outage. Microsoft confirmed the issues were widespread on Xbox Series X/S accounts, but said its investigation into the source of the outage is taking longer than expected.
“We are aware that some users have been disconnected from Xbox Live,” the Xbox support account says he tweeted Tuesday, when players began posting about the outage on social media and Reddit. “We’re investigating! Please follow here and our status page for updates.”
Hours later, the company confirmed that the issues were still ongoing. “Our investigation is taking longer than expected, thank you for your patience and reporting!” the company said common at 4:08 p.m. ET. Then another update at 5:49 p.m. ET. “We are investigating issues affecting users’ ability to sign in to Xbox Live and services,” Microsoft he tweeted“Thank you for your patience while our engineers work.”
According to company status pageproblems affect Xbox accounts and profiles. “You may not be able to sign in to your Xbox profile, you may be disconnected while signing in, or you may have other related issues,” the description reads. “Features that require you to sign in, such as most games, apps, and social activities, will not be available.”
This means that Xbox owners cannot play online games such as Fortnite, Hello InfiniteAND Diablo 4This also means that some users are receiving error messages even when trying to log into their Xbox profiles to play single-player games. One Twitter user named nitpicktim encountered issues while trying to play Persona 5 Royal“A good example of why constant online bullshit is dangerous,” they say he wrote on Twitter that quickly went viral. “I CAN’T PLAY SINGLE-PLAYER GAMES ON THE DISK?!?”
As many were quick to point out, the workaround for this particular bug simply requires players to go into their settings and switch their console to offline mode. In nitpicktima’s case, unplugging the Ethernet cable also worked. I had a similar issue and was able to log back into my profile and access offline games again by simply manually restarting my console. Games within the Offline Game Pass are also unaffected. They remain available for up to 30 days between reconnections to the internet.
While service interruptions are not uncommonIt’s uncommon for entire online features to be unavailable to so many players for so long. And unlike online gaming services on PC, Microsoft charges Xbox users $10 a month to access multiplayer features on their consoles. Let’s hope the outage is resolved quickly.
Update 2/7/2024 10:48 PM ET: Xbox Live is back up and running, Microsoft says. The company didn’t provide a reason for the six-hour outage.
