Microsoft’s Xbox Live service has been down for more than three hours, preventing users from signing in to the service. The Xbox Live problems started at around 3:15PM ET today, and Microsoft has confirmed it’s investigating the outage. “We are aware that users may not be able to sign-in to Xbox Live at this time,” said Xbox support on Twitter. “Our teams are currently investigating to fix this issue.” Xbox support tweeted later to add that that users “may have issues with Purchasing Content and Party Chat as well.”
If you’re not already signed in to your Xbox, the sign-in process will fail with an error, preventing access to certain services like Party Chat. Some apps may also fail to launch without the core Xbox Live services being online, and a number of games will also not launch correctly.
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 https://t.co/PzAdjUFMJj when we have more information to share. https://t.co/H9DDY68yAq
— Xbox Support (@XboxSupport) February 25, 2021
Microsoft has marked the Xbox Live issues as a “major outage” over at the company’s Xbox status page. The outage also means services like xCloud cloud gaming are offline, alongside access to multiplayer games.
This is the first big Xbox Live outage since issues occurred during the Xbox Series X and Series S launch in November last year. Xbox Live also went down a few times throughout 2020, particularly at the beginning of the pandemic when the service faced issues twice in a week as millions started social distancing.
Update February 25th, 6:51PM ET: Added new details from Microsoft and updated headline to note the length of the outage.
