Microsoft’s online console gaming platform Xbox Live suffered a significant disruption of services on Thursday, affecting Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Xbox 360, and Xbox Series S and subscription service Game Pass for up to five hours. All these services were restored by Sunday night.
The severe outage impacting Microsoft’s Xbox Live services began around 3:30 PM EDT on Thursday and lasted for over five hours until 9 PM EDT. Microsoft immediately announced that it was investigating the issue and would restore affected services as soon as possible.
As a result, tens of millions of Xbox Live users were locked out of their accounts and were unable to sign in to the Xbox store or its subscription service, Game Pass. The utility of gaming devices such as Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Xbox 360, and Xbox Series S was reduced to that of a paperweight.
The outage also affected Xbox’s multiplayer services which, in turn, affected Xbox One, cloud gaming, Xbox on Windows, Android and Apple devices, and Xbox 360.
Shortly after Microsoft acknowledged the issue, the Twitter support page of Xbox tweeted that users may also experience problems with services like Purchasing Content and Party Chat.
Our teams are continuing their investigation and have found that users experiencing sign-in issues may have issues with Purchasing Content and Party Chat as well. We will send additional updates here and on when we have more information to share.
— Xbox Support (@XboxSupport) February 25, 2021Opens a new window
According to Microsoft, the Xbox Live gaming network boasted over 100 million monthly active users worldwide as of FY21 Q2. The company’s gaming revenue increased by 51% year-on-year due to impressive demand for gaming consoles such as Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S, which also drove up gaming hardware revenue by 86%. Simultaneously, the number of Game Pass subscribers worldwide grew from 10 million to over 18 million within a year across Xbox and PC.
Microsoft started restoring the affected services soon after the outage was reported by users worldwide. While the team restored most of Xbox Live services such as sign-in to the Xbox store, subscription service, Party Chat by 9 PM on Thursday, Microsoft’s Xbox status web pageOpens a new window showed all affected features functionalities were only up and running on Sunday.
While Xbox subscribers could log in to their accounts on Thursday night, access to many multiplayer games and streaming services was restricted. Meanwhile, millions of gamers are still facing issues in connecting to popular games like Rec Room, Rouge Company, and Spite. Many people are also unable to sign in to their accounts or make a purchase on the online store.
This is the first time that Xbox Live has suffered a prolonged outage since Xbox Series X and Series S were launched in November last year. Going by data from popular web service issue-reporting site DowndetectorOpens a new window , 37,670 people were reporting issues around 7:30 PM EDT on Thursday.
Source: Downdetector | Time in IST
When Xbox Live is down and a new season of Cold War is out pic.twitter.com/J4WJ4hkuo7Opens a new window
— Connor Walsh (@smallclub_) February 25, 2021Opens a new window
In March last year, during the COVID-19-enforced-lockdowns, the Xbox service went down twice within a week due to a sudden influx of a large number of users as social distancing norms came into effect. The reason behind yesterday’s outage, however, remains undisclosed as of now.
Popular online services such as Slack, Twitter, and AWS also reported outages in recent times, but none of them caused nearly as much uproar online as what the Xbox outage did. Some even threatened to shift their gaming needs to Google Stadia or Sony PlayStation.
A tweetOpens a new window by Irwin Lazar, President, and Principal Analyst at consulting firm Metrigy, suggests that this may stem from the fact that the principal demographic group of Xbox Live users or gamers are youngsters bored out of their minds amidst the pandemic. “Two-hour #XboxLive outage may be a defining life moment for #GenZ,†he tweeted.
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