Xbox Live is a lot of things, but it certainly isn’t perfect, and with that imperfection comes downtime. As of this writing, some users are reporting issues signing into the service, causing problems for people attempting to access some of their Game Pass games and other online content.
Microsoft has acknowledged the issues and sent word to their engineering team to try and solve the problem, though no estimated time has been given as to when players will be able to get back online. Currently, the Xbox Live Support website shows the Core Services being down, though other aspects of the service still being online, such as purchasing content and accessing social features.
However, our own testing has not had any luck accessing such features. It is possible that the issues with the Core Services have had an effect on accessing the features on consoles alone, as it is still possible to purchase games directly through Microsoft’s website without encountering any difficulties. Hopefully, the service only offline for a brief period, as opposed to when hackers took down Xbox Live and PSN.
It isn’t that uncommon for online services to go down, whether it’s an issue with Xbox or PlayStation. As time goes on, the issues will likely become less frequent as internet infrastructure gets better. There will pretty much always be planned outages for updates, but hopefully, Microsoft and Sony will sort out a majority of the issues on their respective services by the time Project Scarlett and the PS5 roll out. While that relatively short timeframe is likely unrealistic, one can always hope.
These outages do raise the question of whether or not gaming is ready for an all-digital future. After all, if Google Stadia was to go down, gamers wouldn’t be able to play anything, considering the streamed nature of the platform. It’s a slightly concerning notion and one that the company will probably want to address before Google Stadia launches this November.
It’ll likely only be a short amount of time until Xbox Live is back up and running, though the outage is frustrating for players hoping to enjoy some mid-afternoon gaming. This page will be updated when the service is back online.
