Xbox Live is back up after major outage — here’s what happened

Close to 1:15 PM Pacific, Xbox Support reported that the investigation into the outage was taking longer than expected.

The status page still lists Accounts & Profiles as having issues with a pending resolution.

Close to 1:15 PM Pacific, Xbox Support reported that the investigation into the outage was taking longer than expected.

The status page still lists Accounts & Profiles as having issues with a pending resolution.

As of 1:40 PM PST, Xbox Live remains down with no new updates from Xbox. And it's looking like it's still global. 

We've seen complaints from the US, Brazil, Japan and even France. 

A French Xbox blog confirmed that the outage is affecting Xbox on PC, console and mobile devices.

While reporting into Down Detector peaked around 38,000 reports close to 12 PM Pacific, the service has seen a steady 10,000+ reports up to now.

The Xbox Support subredditis flooded with posts regarding the outage.

One redditor is claiming with some network settings workarounds you can get offline games working and apps like YouTube and Spotify. It requires you to sign in offline. A different user confirmed this in a different post. If only Reddit users looked at what's already been posted. 

It is now 2 PM Pacific and it looks like Xbox Live is still down. According to the Xbox status page, the first outage was reported to them at 11:07 AM PST. 

The company has listed the issue as a major issue. "You may not be able to sign-in to your Xbox profile, may be disconnected while signed in, or have other related problems. Features that require sign-in like most games, apps and social activity won't be available."

A brief update at 1:53 PM claimed they found a related issue, but did not explain what the issue might be. 

The Xbox Support Twitter page and other platforms have not posted any updates since the one closer to 1:15 PM. 

It's unclear if the outage is affecting everyone or not. 

Take this with a grain of troll, but we have seen users on X claiming that they are playing Xbox. One user claimed he was playing Destiny and using Discord on his Xbox. Probably a troll.

I'm on the West Coast of the United States, and for the most part this will only affect kids on summer break but on the east coast, people are starting to get off work and I  imagine they want a little gaming break. 

Looking around the internet, it appears that the service is still down. 

Although, one Reddit user reminded us that about a decade ago, there was a group of hackers calling themselves the Lizard Squad who used DDoS attacks to take down Xbox Live among a number of other services throughout 2014. 

I doubt this is caused by that same group if it is a DDoS attack or otherwise. 

The moderators of the Xbox reddit quickly deleted the Lizard Squad post. Hmm?

That said, the mods appear to be deleting most of the posts related to the outage, probably to not clog the feeds but still.

A Reddit user who has been tracking the outage and claims they can now reach the sign-in page, which was previously unavailable.

The outage is ongoing and no updates have been released by Microsoft or Xbox.

Over on X, between Xbox Series X, Xbox, and Xbox Live, the social media site has seen nearly 50,000 posts in the last hour or so.

This issue does highlight the modern gaming problem of so many services needing to be always online.

We've seen tons of posts from players who want to play games like Skyrim, Minecraft (assuming they're not in servers) or even sports titles like EA's FC2024 or 2K's NBA2K24 which aren't accessible because of the connectivity issue.

Though, as reported previously there is a network setting workaround where you sign as offline. Supposedly that is working for some games and apps.

As of 2:30 PM Pacific, Xbox Live is still down. It has been 3-and-a-half hours since the service first went down.

Supposedly, yesterday, the PlayStation Network went down for about 2 hours, but it was quickly brought back by Sony. Not clear if its related to today's Xbox Live outage.

Xbox Live is still down.

@brandonspam_

xbox servers are currently down and people are not very happy…

♬ original sound - Brandon Conner

The Xbox Live status page updated with a brief note saying, "It's taking longer than anticipated."

The Xbox Support X profile has provided a brief update. Things are still down and the investigation continues.

It is now 3 PM Pacific and Xbox Live is still down. 

Meanwhile the internet is like the below tweet.

That or they're begging Snoop Dogg to yell at Bill Gates again.

Someone claiming to be an Xbox Rep on Down Detector said this, "Xbox Rep This outage is giving our tech team a hard time. We are looking at a resolve to the issue in about 3 hours. Sorry for the wait and your paitence (sic) in our team."

I am inclined to believe it's a troll job, but if it is true, and with the ongoing outage, that would mean we won't see the service back up until 6 PM Pacific. 

We're seeing conflicting reports from around the web saying that some people are able to sign in but can't actually do anything in Xbox Live, while others are claiming its still down.

The company has not confirmed anything on any of their platforms at this time.

Otherwise, the internet is mostly people demanding Xbox give them free Xbox Live or some other compensation since the service has been borked for so long. At this point, perhaps they do.

Our speculation is that this outage was caused by a DDoS attack.

A reader reached out and said they were able to connect to Xbox Live and play a game. 

We're seeing reports from people that they're able to get on and play games. It's unclear what regions are getting server access back. One Redditor who posted on the Xbox subreddit appears to be from Ohio. 

Another person from Dubai claimed they were able to get in on Twitter (or X). 

If it is coming back, it's doing so slowly and on a case-by-case basis.

Over at PC World, Mark Hachman, reports that the outage is affecting games differently. 

His example was solitaire which wouldn't let him save any progress but would allow him to at least play Klondike to his heart's content.

Meanwhile, the game Brotato was completely unplayable and wouldn't load without an Xbox sign-in. He speculates that this will be the case for most games that are "free" to download from Xbox Live.

We've been keeping an eye on this post over in the Xbox Support subreddit. 

They're claiming that Ohio, North London, and Ireland are back up and able to access Xbox Live. A commentator also noted that they're from Buffalo, New York and have access. 

Are you from any of of those regions? Let us know if you have access.

A user on X reached out to say that they're in Ohio and currently don't have access.

We're certain it's frustrating seeing people post that they're able to jump on now and claiming that the service is back up. It's looking like it's spotty regarding who does and does not currently have access to Xbox Live. 

As of this posting, nothing has changed on any of Xbox's platforms. The service is still experiencing issues.

As of 4 PM Pacific, the Xbox Support page and Xbox Status page still list the service as suffering from an outage.

However, we did have a couple more followers from Oklahoma and British Columbia reach out saying that service is up for them.

It's looking like Xbox Live is slowly gaining partial service across the globe, or at least North America, but it's unclear what the timeline is for getting most users back up and running. 

A few more readers reached out. One from Ireland claimed he's been refreshing hoping Xbox Live would pop up but so far it's stayed down.

Another from Southern Oregon says that he's playing with his friends right now.

Still, the service remains down otherwise. The main Xbox status sites still say major outage.

That Reddit post is claiming that the outage has been reduced to partial. 

A number of Tom's Guide readers have reached out sharing their Xbox Live status. Here's a partial list:

• Salt Lake City, Utah - Up
• Cleveland, Ohio - Up
• Arkansas - Down
• Alabama - Up
• Delaware - Down
• Northern Oklahoma - Down
• Kansas City - Up
• Manchester, Northern United Kingdom - Up
• Southern Ontario, Canada - Up

Over on Down Detector, we're also seeing a lot of posts for outages regarding popular online games like Fortnite and Call of Duty.

We're certain that it's related to Xbox Live being down as no one has reported outages for those games on PlayStation Network or for Steam versions.

As of this writing, Down Detector finally dipped down under 10,000 outage reports and is hovering around 7,000. Still no small shakes but less than the 10,000 reports that it was receiving the last two or three hours. 

It is now 5 PM Pacific and as of this writing, officially, Xbox Live is still down with no updates to the status page or from the Xbox Support accounts.

The last update from the support page was two hours ago. The three posts on X from the Xbox Support account have received nearly 28,000 responses. 

We have seen a downtick in outage reports on Down Detector and more people are reporting the ability to log in and play games. There are still people reporting that they do not have access. 

We've also seen comments from users claiming they can log in but that their friend list is bugged or their Game Pass isn't loading properly. 

We have reached out to Xbox and will update if the company responds. 

As of this writing, Xbox Live has been down in some capacity for some users for six hours.

Developer Bungie has said on X (Twitter) that "Issues affecting players logging into Destiny 1 & 2 across Microsoft are subsiding."

Outside of official channels, it does appear the service is returning for people. Down Detector's outage reports is slowly declining. 

The main Xbox account which had reposted the Xbox Support post about the issue has scrubbed that repost. Otherwise, officially, Xbox has not made any new statements about the issue. The Xbox Status page still lists a major outage with a pending resolution.

Which isn't to say that the everyone is back on. We're still seeing people claiming they can't get on. 

It looks things have finally turned around for Xbox Live.

As of 5:50 PM Pacific the Xbox Status page was updated to say All Clear. Though a resolution is still pending.

The Xbox Support account on X tweeted, "Users should no longer be encountering issues signing into Xbox Live and services. Thank you for your patience, game on!"

We'll keep an eye on things and update if anything changes but for now, it appears that Xbox Live is back up and running.

Still no word on why this happened. If Xbox responds to our queries, we'll be sure to update.

In total, the outage lasted for nearly seven hours.

We're more than 12 hours removed from Xbox Live going down, and everything appears to be working perfectly still. We've been playing The First Descendent on Xbox Series X without issue, and reports indicate that popular games like Call of Duty and Fortnite are working fine. 

Browsing around the Xbox menu and looking at the store works well. We even tried downloading a game, and the average speed for my ISP was around 300Mbps. 

We can officially close the case on the great Xbox Live outage of 2024 and call it a day. However, despite almost every tech and gaming publication on the web's best efforts (us included), Microsoft has yet to comment on what happened (outside of the X post informing everyone that things were working late last night). It would be nice to put this all to bed with a reason things went wrong, but that might be wishful thinking on our part.