Xbox users have spent the last several hours cut off from the platform’s online features following a major outage. Microsoft confirmed the issues were widespread across Xbox Series X/S accounts but said its investigation into the source of the downtime was taking longer than expected.
“We are aware that some users have been disconnected from Xbox Live,” the company’s Xbox Support account tweeted on Tuesday as players began posting about the outage across social media and Reddit. “We’re investigating! Please follow here and on our status page for updates.”
Hours later, it followed up to confirm that the issues were ongoing. “Our investigation is taking longer than expected, thank you for your patience and reports!” the company shared at 4:08 p.m. ET. That was followed by another update at 5:49 p.m. ET. “Investigation continues into issues impacting users ability to sign in to Xbox Live and services,” Microsoft tweeted. “Thank you for your patience while our engineers work.”
According to the company’s status page, the problems are isolated to Xbox accounts and profiles. “You may not be able to sign-in to your Xbox profile, may be disconnected while signed in, or have other related problems,” the description reads. “Features that require sign-in like most games, apps and social activity won’t be available.”
What that means Xbox owners are unable to play online games like Fortnite, Halo Infinite, and Diablo 4, it also means that some users are facing error messages even when they try to log into their Xbox profiles to play single-player games. One Twitter user going by the handle nitpicktim ran into problems trying to play Persona 5 Royal. “Fine example why always online bullshit is dangerous,” they wrote in a tweet that quickly went viral. “I CANNOT PLAY A DISK BASED SINGLE PLAYER GAME?!?”
As many quickly pointed out, however, the workaround for this particular error simply requires players go into their settings and put the console in offline mode. In nitpicktim’s case, pulling out the ethernet cable also worked. I had a similar problem and was able to sign back into my profile and access offline games again simply by manually restarting my console. Offline Game Pass games are also unaffected. They remain accessible for up to 30 days in-between reconnecting to the internet.
While service interruptions aren’t unheard of, it’s rare for entire network features to be down for so many players for such a long period of time. And unlike online services for PC gaming, Microsoft charges Xbox users $10 a month in order to access multiplayer features on their consoles. Hopefully the outage gets resolved quickly.
Update 7/2/2024 10:48 p.m. ET: Xbox Live is up and running again without issue, Microsoft says. The company did not provide a reason for the six hour outage.