UPDATE 8:30 p.m. ET:Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet said his team has traced today’s outage to the failure of a licensing service that “Xbox depends on.” That triggered sign-in scenarios to fail, followed by “many scenarios that require an entitlement check…such as listing out your Full Library and launching games that you own,” he tweeted. “It also affected several of our publishing and store partners who depend on those same systems, which is why some of you saw issues in specific games and not others.”
Service was restored as of 2:30 p.m. PT, but it “came back unevenly across regions, which is why some of you recovered hours before others,” Van Vliet added. “This is an unacceptable situation, and we must do better to support you.
Xbox is now running “a full post-incident review,” Van Vliet says, and will deliver details in the coming weeks.
“I care less about the one-line root cause and more about the real questions: why a failure in one service was able to take down this much, why recovery took as long as it did, and what we change so a single point of failure can’t ruin your night again,” he added. “That means hardening the dependencies underneath sign in and game launch, improving how we detect and contain this class of failure, and being faster and clearer with you when something breaks.
UPDATE 7 p.m. ET:Xbox says the outage “should now be mitigated,” and “You should once again be able to launch games, sign in, and complete purchases.” It did not offer details on what happened, but urged gamers to “let us know if anything still looks off.”
UPDATE 5:30 p.m. ET:Xbox says it’s “making progress on recovery” and that “most players should be able to launch titles and complete purchases again.” However, it warns that, “Some may still see occasional failures as we finish up.”
UPDATE 5 p.m. ET:As we hit the end of the workday on the East Coast, it’s still looking rough for Xbox. “Xbox incident update — thanks for your continued patience. Our engineers are still working to identify a fix, and we’ll share more as soon as we can,” the support account tweeted.
UPDATE 3 p.m. ET: Xbox says “things are slowly improving, though players worldwide may still experience failures launching games, along with potential sign-in and purchase issues,” adding, “We apologize for the long-running nature of this issue.”
UPDATE 2:15 p.m. ET: Xbox is still having trouble with access to its game library, sign-in, and game launches, according to the XBOXSupport X account. “Our teams are focused on multiple investigation angles and remain hard at work. Thanks for your patience while teams keep working,” it says. Updates are being posted to support.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-live-status.
Original Story:
Many Xbox players are finding they’re unable to sign in, browse their game library, buy new titles, or even play their own physical games this morning.
The problems began at 5:30 a.m. ET on Monday. Xbox’s support page confirms issues after spikes on Downdetector, with thousands of users reporting problems.
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An update from Microsoft at 8 a.m. ET said its team was continuing to work on the issues. “Just checking in on the game library, sign-in, and game launch issue. We know this has been going on a while and appreciate your patience while our teams keep working on it,” it wrote.
So far, there’s no word on when a fix will be rolled out or what’s causing the problems. Xbox’s support page says it’s affecting digital and disc-based games on all its consoles, from the latest Xbox Series X and S to the Xbox 360. It also confirms there are problems with accessing its backward-compatibility features.
Some users are finding they can’t sign in to their accounts at all, while others can’t access the store to download new titles. Other Microsoft warnings say to expect to “be disconnected while signed in, or have other related problems.”
This outage comes less than a week after a series of problems with Xbox’s online services. An outage occurred on July 23, coinciding with the early-access launch of Halo: Campaign Evolved, preventing some players from accessing the game or other online services. Those issues were resolved in about two hours, so this outage has been longer and appears to affect more of Microsoft’s online services.
Xbox’s troubles come a few days after the PlayStation Network was also hit with a brief outage.
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