On Tuesday, Xbox Live, Microsoft’s premier gaming and digital media network, experienced a widespread outage that left thousands of users unable to connect to the service. The issue, which began around 2:00 PM ET, prevented users from signing in, playing online games, downloading content, and accessing other features that require a valid Xbox Live account.
According to Downdetector, a website that tracks outages and downtime, user-reported problems with Xbox Live started to surge around 2:15 PM ET, with over 23,000 outage reports logged within an hour. Many users took to social media to express their frustration, with some reporting error messages indicating that the service was undergoing “scheduled maintenance.”
Xbox Support acknowledged the issue on their X account, stating,
“We are aware that some users have been disconnected from Xbox Live. We’re investigating!”
The company’s status page was later updated to reflect a major outage of the “Account & profile” service, which affected users’ ability to sign in to their Xbox profiles, access online games, and engage in social activities.
The investigation into the cause of the outage took “longer than expected,” with Xbox Support providing periodic updates to users. Finally, at around 9:00 PM ET, the issue was resolved, and users were able to access Xbox Live services once again. In a post on X, Xbox Support thanked users for their patience, saying,
“Users should no longer be encountering issues signing in to Xbox Live and services. Thank you for your patience, game on!”
Although the exact cause of the outage remains unclear, Microsoft has assured users that the technical problems have been resolved.
