Xbox users have been unable to access the platform’s online features for the past few hours due to a major outage. Microsoft confirmed that the issues were widespread among Xbox Series X/S accounts, but said the investigation into the cause of the downtime took longer than expected.
“We are aware that some users have been disconnected from Xbox Live,” the company’s Xbox Support account says tweeted on Tuesday, as players began posting about the outage on social media and Reddit. “We’re investigating! Please follow us here and on 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 reports!” divided at 4:08 p.m. ET. This was followed by another update at 5:49 p.m. ET. “We are continuing to investigate issues affecting users’ ability to sign in to Xbox Live and services,” Microsoft said tweeted“Thank you for your patience while our engineers work.”
According to the Company status pagethe issues are limited to Xbox accounts and profiles. “You may not be able to sign in to your Xbox profile, you may be disconnected while you’re signed in, or you may experience other related issues,” the description says. “Features that require signing in, like most games, apps, and social activities, will be unavailable.”
This means that Xbox owners cannot play online games like Fourteen days
However, as many were quick to note, the workaround for this particular bug simply requires players to go into their settings and put the console into offline mode. In nitpicktim’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. Offline Game Pass games are also unaffected. They will remain accessible for up to 30 days between re-establishing the internet connection.
While service interruptions are not uncommonit’s rare for entire network functions to go down for so many players for such a long period of time. And unlike online services for PC gaming, Microsoft charges Xbox users $10 per month to access multiplayer features on their consoles. Hopefully the outage will be resolved quickly.
Update July 2, 2024 10:48 p.m. ET: According to Microsoft, Xbox Live is running again without problems. The company did not give a reason for the six-hour interruption.