Xbox Live is currently down as thousands of gamers in the UK and US report an outage. Most of the issues are affecting signing in, the core Xbox Live service and purchasing items.
Xbox fans are furious tonight as games are not working and gamers are unable to log in due to a massive outage that has been going on for hours.
No, it’s not just your screen that’s freezing – Xbox Live is indeed experiencing a major outage. Gamers across the platform are hitting a brick wall tonight with technical issues, particularly with logging in, preventing countless players from diving into their favorite games like Minecraft.
The technical issues began around 8pm and have continued, marking a significant period of disruption. Down Detector, the online service that tracks outages worldwide, was inundated with some 30,000 complaints at the height of tonight’s gaming prime time, underscoring the scale of the outage.
On the Xbox Support subreddit on Reddit, as of around 01:00 GMT, it is claimed that the outage has been reduced to partial, but thousands of people are still reporting that they can’t use Xbox Live, with many giving up and going to bed. Services appear to be gradually coming back online as more regions have access to their games.
On Twitter, frustrated users voiced their complaints about the downtime. Ben, an exasperated Xbox enthusiast, expressed his annoyance: “I feel incredibly bad that I can’t play Minecraft because Xbox Live services are down.”
Gregg, another affected player, shared his in-game calamity: “I was fighting a dragon in the Elden Ring and got kicked out because Xbox said the person who bought the game needed to log in. I can’t fix it because Xbox Live is down.”
And Realz, looking for solidarity, asked: “Is Xbox Live down for anyone else too?”
The flood of reports about Down Detector has begun to ebb and now stands at around 10,000, which could mean Microsoft is regaining control. However, the problem is far from solved for many gamers worldwide who remain locked out of Xbox Live.
Microsoft has acknowledged the issues plaguing Xbox users, with their service status page revealing: “You may be unable to sign in to your Xbox profile, may be disconnected while signed in, or experience other related issues. Features that require you to sign in, such as most games, apps, and social activities, will be unavailable.”
The tech giant also took to Twitter to inform gamers: “We are aware that some users have been disconnected from Xbox Live. We are investigating! Our investigation is taking longer than expected, thank you for your patience and reporting!”.
Latest update
As of midnight, the Xbox Support page and the Xbox Status page still indicated that the gaming service was experiencing an outage.
But some gaming fans are reportedly able to use the service. This indicates that Xbox is gradually starting to regain partial service, at least in the US, but there’s no word on a timeline for when all users will see their services up and running again.
00:58 Improving service delivery – More regions have access to the service. Services seem to be slowly coming back online.
00:36 Service Improvement – Access in South East England (Reddit user was able to log in and play on a Realm in Minecraft)
00:28 Service Degradation – Users report losing access to services after being temporarily online.
00:22 Service Improvement – Number of regions with access to services continues to increase. Incident is still being flagged as a major outage on Xbox Support, but due to the number of users claiming access to services I have marked it as Partial.
00:06 Improving Services – Access to services is now possible in many parts of the US.
23:40 Service Improvement – Some regions are now PARTIALLY UP
23:23 Service Improvement – Users continue to report that the service is available. Multiple sources indicate that users have partial access to Xbox Live Services in certain regions (although unknown).
23:18 Service Improvement – Sign-in now primarily online. Xbox app and console users can sign in in most cases, but individual games that use Xbox Live services and the Xbox Store will still remain disconnected.
22:49 Service Improvement – Some users can log in.
22:42 Xbox has indicated that it is taking longer than expected to resolve the issue, which will further reduce the ETR.