Xbox Live Takes a Nosedive, Drags Consoles with It

If you are trying to use your Xbox console right now, there is a good chance you are frustrated. Microsoft’s Xbox Live service is currently down which makes using the device, quite a bit harder.

And this is a serious outage, the company’s status page is barely functioning and only says that some games and services are having issues. But upon expansion of the dialog, it simply says Xbox Live Core Services are impacted.

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The primary issue that is being reported is that after booting up, you may be presented with a black screen. If you are running into this issue, try unplugging your ethernet cord as that might resolve the issue.

Microsoft says that they are aware of the issue and are looking into the outage; the company is rolling back a service update that was deployed today. The company is not providing a timeline for the service to return to normal operation but knowing they have identified the issue, it hopefully shouldn’t be too long.

While Microsoft’s Xbox Live service typically has good uptime, outages are inevitable. This is the downside to a connected console like the Xbox platform because when the service does drop like this, it can make playing any game, even those that are single player, impossible or more difficult.

[Update] The rollback has been completed, service should be returning to normal and if not, reboot your console.

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Conversation 17 comments

  • StevenLayton

    30 January, 2019 - 2:15 pm

    <p>Having just felt the wrath of my 12 year old daughter, who wasn't able to satisfy her Minecraft addiction as we're getting the blank screen, I'm pleased that she hasn't actually broken her xbox. Now I know its xbox live, I will now pretend that I've disabled her Xbox until she does enough chores to earn more xbox time….</p>

    • coeus89

      30 January, 2019 - 3:06 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#400690">In reply to StevenLayton:</a></em></blockquote><p>That's the most creative thing I have heard all day.</p>

  • choo07

    30 January, 2019 - 2:18 pm

    <p>This is so sad</p>

  • Lauren Glenn

    30 January, 2019 - 2:25 pm

    <p>Firing up the Nintendo Switch now.</p>

  • MarkPow

    Premium Member
    30 January, 2019 - 2:28 pm

    <p>I too am "suffering" with the black-screen-with-login-chime of death…</p><p><br></p><p>I do feel that these devices should be able to function correctly offline. This never happened with my SNES!</p>

  • waethorn

    30 January, 2019 - 2:37 pm

    <p>Azure &amp; Office 365 (are they still separate?) had issues the other day too.</p>

  • rm

    30 January, 2019 - 2:42 pm

    <p>They need an separate test bed of Xbox servers as a QA environment apparently. One they has select Xbox consoles in peoples houses integrated with it. So, they can do a real world test implementation.</p>

  • carlmess

    30 January, 2019 - 3:00 pm

    <p>There have been other failed services such as the Office 365 and Azure global authentication.</p>

  • dontbe evil

    31 January, 2019 - 1:38 am

    <p>shit happens… overall still much more stable and fast than ps network</p>

    • waethorn

      31 January, 2019 - 9:51 am

      <blockquote><em><a href="#400785">In reply to dontbe_evil:</a></em></blockquote><p>Shit happens in your head. PSN has been running fine for a long time now.</p>

      • dontbe evil

        31 January, 2019 - 11:58 pm

        <blockquote><em><a href="#400837">In reply to Waethorn:</a></em></blockquote><p>outage.report/playstation-network</p>

        • StevenLayton

          01 February, 2019 - 3:52 pm

          <blockquote><a href="#401121"><em>In reply to dontbe_evil:</em></a><em> Don't go confusing the discussion by bringing facts and statistics into it ;)</em></blockquote><p><br></p>

          • dontbe evil

            02 February, 2019 - 3:45 am

            <blockquote><em><a href="#401231">In reply to StevenLayton:</a></em></blockquote><p>LOL you're right, haters doesn't appreciate it :)</p>

  • DJS

    31 January, 2019 - 2:20 pm

    <p>When you look at the Xbox Support Twitter account, it's pretty crazy how often Live has some kind of issue. Multiple times per week. What happened? It was never like this in the 360 days.</p>

    • dontbe evil

      01 February, 2019 - 2:27 am

      <blockquote><em><a href="#400985">In reply to DJS:</a></em></blockquote><p>check PSN</p>

  • 2ilent8cho

    01 February, 2019 - 9:50 am

    <p>I feel like console wise this is the turning point generation to a direction i do not like, and even single player breaking when like today just because it cannot talk to Xbox live highlights the concern. I love retro gaming and have many old consoles and games that work as well today as they did 20 years ago. Can i say the same in 20 years about PS4 and Xbox One? I doubt it, with so much digital only content and updates its just going to be a mess when i want some nostalgia in the future. </p><p><br></p><p>While it is not going to happen both Microsoft and Sony should have made LAN mode mandatory on any multiplayer title as part of the developer conditions (i remember when most early Xbox 360 games had System Link) so in the future you can continue to play multiplayer when the online part no longer works because PSN or Xbox Live support has been killed. </p><p><br></p><p>or</p><p><br></p><p>The next Xbox or Playstation needs to take backward compatibility extremely seriously as in the key feature and make ALL the titles available from previous consoles available on the newer ones. </p>

  • Patrick3D

    01 February, 2019 - 2:34 pm

    <p>Black screen of death was something many Windows 10 systems where I work experienced with the anniversary feature update. That was due to computers waiting for drivers that were not WHQL approved and therefore held everything up. In many cases a Logitech Unifying Adapter was enough to prevent boot. It sounds like there is a driver for one of the many peripherals available for Xbox One that caused this issue. Pulling the Ethernet cord may not be enough for people using Wi-Fi depending on when the network stack initializes. Disconnecting a computer from the network is something I have to do with every feature update <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">for one of our engineer's laptop </span>due to the updates trying to force a newer AMD video driver than the hybrid graphics in the laptop are capable of working with. Microsoft QA is really non-existent at this point, maybe they shouldn't have laid them off.</p>

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