I hope no one was hoping to escape reality for a few hours using Xbox last night because the service experienced an hours-long outage.
“We are aware that users may not be able to sign-in to Xbox Live at this time,” the Xbox team tweeted at about 4:00 pm ET yesterday. “Our teams are currently investigating to fix this issue.”
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After a couple of updates, the Xbox team later tweeted that the issues had been resolved and that the service was back up. That update arrived at about 9:30 pm ET.
On the Xbox Status page, which is now all green, Microsoft labeled the outage as a “Major outage,” and noted that virtually all of its Xbox services, including the Game Streaming (xCloud) feature of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, were down.
I believe this is the first major Xbox outage since the release of the Xbox Series X|S consoles.
b6gd
<blockquote><em><a href="#615500">In reply to jules75:</a></em></blockquote><p>You can play offline for single player games if you disconnect your Xbox from the network. If the network is up but you can't reach Xbox Live then you have the issue you had.</p>
b6gd
<blockquote><em><a href="#615560">In reply to rbgaynor:</a></em></blockquote><p>Lol. The outage for me at least happened when I am least likely to get on. It was around the end of the work day, dinner, post dinner activities. By the time I got around to jumping on my XSX, the outage was over.</p>
ragingthunder
<p>The irony is real here. Just a couple of days ago Thurrott was heavily preaching cloud gaming.</p>
b6gd
<p>With Microsoft's clear focus on a Cloud and Subscription future, these type of outages are never good. </p><p><br></p><p>My team at work manages our O365 and Azure solutions and in 2020 we had a lot of outages, some with multiple week issues. We also manage AWS solutions which never had any issues. </p><p><br></p><p>Sure 2020 was a challenge for many vendors but when you are putting all of your eggs in the cloud basket you need to get it right.</p>