Xbox Live outage — login and game save syncing issues affected millions globally

Ouch, that's a nasty spike

We've been keeping an eye on this Downdetector chart for the past hour or so, and so far the numbers have kept climbing. But unlike your level in an RPG or the damage output of your favorite FPS weapon, this is a number we don't want to be large.

What's Microsoft saying?

Looking at Microsoft's own Xbox Status page, we see a yellow warning sign for syncing games. So be careful if you've not backed up your saves recently - you may want to wait to try until after whatever issue we're having has passed.

Xbox on X's last transmission

There's nothing on any of Xbox's official X accounts, including Xbox Support. The most recent official message was from Xbox Game Pass, announcing the latest batch of games. It may be a coincidence, but that is around the time outage reports began to climb.

No log-in issues, but other problems?

Some users seem to be having problems logging into Xbox in the first place, but we're not having that same trouble. The most we're seeing is a save-syncing issue - when trying to save Cities: Skylines II in the screenshot above, the sync hung on 26% for a whole five minutes.

Is it over?

The Down Detector spike has quickly dropped off. But in our own testing, that game save sync is still hung on 26%. Closed and reopened the app and still issues. We're keeping a close eye on it.

Microsoft says the issues aren't over yet

Another look at the Xbox Live status page shows the issue hasn't been resolved yet.

Game save syncs still not working

No word of a joke, I've closed and reopened the Xbox app multiple times, and it's still showing 26%.

BREAKING: Game Save syncing is working

Both in the U.S. and the U.K., Xbox Live cloud game saves are working. Not only that, but logins are working both on the PC Xbox app and Xbox consoles. Based on this confirmation and our methods of analyzing outages showing the service as running, I'm happy to say the outage is resolved.

We'll keep a close eye on the situation — just in case the mitigation causes any further issues.