Ouch, last night was not a good evening for Xbox gamers, as Xbox Live had a total outage lasting several hours. Everything is back up and running now, but it certainly wasn’t pretty.
Anyone who planned to spend a cozy evening playing Destiny 2, Diablo IV or other titles yesterday had to miss out or resort to playing offline titles. Microsoft’s online service was down for several hours yesterday, making it impossible to log in with your accounts.
Relatively quickly after the outage began, angry players reported on social media and Xbox Support responded fairly quickly with status tweets, but were not able to get to the bottom of the problem particularly quickly. “Our investigation is taking longer than expected. Thank you for your patience and your reports! We will keep you updated here and on our status page,” was the message after some time.
The status page read: “You may not be able to sign in to your Xbox profile, you may lose your connection while you are signed in, or you may experience other related issues,” the description said. “Features that require signing in, such as most games, apps, and social activities, will be unavailable.”
According to Microsoft, the sign-in issues affected pretty much all platforms and services such as Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One and Xbox 360, as well as mobile devices, web services, cloud gaming, backwards compatibility and Xbox on Windows.
During the night, after a six-hour outage, the all-clear was given that all services were back up and running. Such long outages are rather unusual and Microsoft has not yet given a reason for the glitch. But for players, this is another reason to harshly criticize the online requirement of many games: “Fine example of why always online bullshit is dangerous.”
Microsoft has announced three new variants of the Xbox Series X/S for fall 2024.
