Yesterday was a big day in the gaming world, with the long awaited launch of the Xbox Series X and Series S consoles. Both consoles were in extremely high demand, and there have been lots of stories of gamers who have been struggling to get hold of one for themselves.
A lot of people did get one, though, and that came with its own share of problems, including the fact Xbox Live was struggling to cope with the influx of new logins.
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Xbox Live, as many will already know, is Microsoft’s online gaming service. Whether you’re looking to play with new gamers, purchase and download new games, or something else that requires an active internet connection, it all goes through Xbox Live. So servers that are struggling due to extreme demand isn’t a good sign.
It’s a story that happens all too often with the launch of some new online game or service, since launch day is when you get the huge influx of players all trying to get online at the same time. It’s frustrating, to be sure, but even more so when you can’t properly use the console you effectively had to fight for. Especially if it’s an all-digital Xbox Series S, which doesn’t have an optical disk drive to fall back on in these situations.
Microsoft tweeted out that it was aware of the issue and working on a fix, before announcing that the problem was solved and users should be able to login to Xbox Live once again.
Users should once again be able to sign into Xbox Live! Thank you for the reports, and for your patience. As always we're here and listening. https://t.co/OOc4KmL9ESNovember 10, 2020
How things turn out over the next few days, as more and more people receive and set up their new consoles, is still unknown. Hopefully, launch day was just a blip because it was the first day the console was available. So things should calm down quite quickly.
Of course the PS5 launches in the U.S. and Japan tomorrow, and it could well be that we see a similar situation of players trying to access the PlayStation Network. The PS5 launch is being staggered, which should lessen the burden on the servers. But early data showed it was considerably more popular than the Xbox Series X, which could balance that out in the worst way. That is, of course, assuming enough people managed to get a pre-order that guaranteed a launch day delivery.
Both the Xbox Series X and PS5 are set to be in high demand for quite some time. Beyond the holidays and into early 2021 if we’re unlucky. Some retailers have confirmed they’ll have PS5 stock available on launch day, and now the Xbox Series X launch is out of the way we should expect to see demand for the console level out.
If you still need to get your hands on either console, we’ve been keeping tabs on all the latest Xbox Series X stock and PS5 stock updates to save you constantly checking back and forth between all the different retailers.
