Original story follows.
Around 10am CST on February 1, Xbox Live went down for some users for the second time in a week. The issues being reported include inability to sign in to profiles or access digitally-owned content. Microsoft says its Xbox Support team is aware of the issues and working to fix it. At the time of this writing, no cause for the outage has been confirmed.
A couple of days ago, Xbox Live went down with a major outage that some dubbed the Black Screen of Death. This outage caused some Xbox Live users to only see a black screen when trying to use their console. Unfortunately, there were individuals who didn’t realize the black screen was just due to an Xbox Live issue, and factory reset their console before the fix was in place.
This current issue doesn’t seem to be causing the “Black Screen of Death,” but it’s still frustrating for Xbox Live users. In the past, Xbox Live services have been noted for their reliability, only dipping out on very rare occasions. To have important functions of Xbox Live become unavailable to users for the second time in a single week may start to hurt the service’s previously strong reputation.
What may make this particular Xbox Live outage even more frustrating is that it is happening at the same time as the Anthem open demo. This means that gamers who missed out on the previous open demo and were looking forward to seeing what the upcoming action-RPG is all about may be missing out on their chance to do so.
For the sake of those who want to try the Anthem open demo or who just want to play their games, here’s hoping Microsoft figures out a solution sooner rather than later. In the meantime, it will be interesting to see if it’s revealed what has been causing these issues lately, and if there is a long-term plan in place to address the problem.
We will update this article as soon as Xbox Live services have been fully restored.
