Massive Xbox Outage Leaves Players Locked Out of Their Own Games

Xbox players around the world have spent most of Monday locked out of their accounts and their game libraries, in an outage that started Sunday night and is still not fully resolved. Microsoft’s status page shows major outages across four services: Account & profile, Store & subscriptions, Games & gaming, and Apps & mobile.

The result is that people cannot sign in, see the games they own, launch anything they have downloaded, or open the Xbox mobile app. Disc-based and backwards-compatible titles have been affected too, since the console still checks in with Microsoft’s servers before letting a game run, which means a physical copy sitting in the tray does not help.

Down Detector reports peaked at 3,296 around midnight and had tapered to roughly 700 by 9 a.m. Monday. Of those complaints, 67 per cent were about games failing to launch.

Xbox Support first acknowledged the problem on X several hours after it began.

“We are aware that some users are encountering errors when attempting to sign in, see your game library, or launch games. Our engineers are actively working to mitigate the issue. For updates, please follow along here or on https://msft.it/6015vCwkS.”

A few hours later, with the outage dragging on, the account posted again.

“Just checking in on the game library, sign-in, and game launch issue. We know this has been going on a while and appreciate your patience while our teams keep working on it. Watch here or at http://support.xbox.com for updates.”

The most recent update came Monday afternoon and struck a slightly more optimistic tone, though Microsoft still has not given a timeline or explained what caused the failure.

“XBOX incident update: we apologize for the long-running nature of this issue. Things are slowly improving, though players worldwide may still experience failures launching games, along with potential sign-in and purchase issues. Watch here or at http://support.xbox.com for updates.”

This is the second Xbox outage in about a week. The last one landed on the same day Halo: Campaign Evolved went into Early Access, blocking players from getting in. It also follows a PlayStation Network outage last week that knocked PSN offline for several hours.