An Xbox Live outage has kept players from logging on and enjoying online games for almost four hours at the time of writing. Xbox Live, Microsoft’s paid platform for online multiplayer, first reported problems at around 19:00 BST (14:00 EDT), and has been offline for an extended period of time.
The outage, which appears to be affecting Europe and North America was acknowledged by Microsoft on their official Xbox Support Twitter/X account, and caused many users to be disconnected and unable to log back on.
The cause for the outage isn’t clear, but coincides with the launch of two large games on the Xbox platform. July 2 is the launch date for both Final Fantasy XIV’s latest expansion, Dawntrail, and for third-person looter shooter The First Decendant. These two titles are massively multiplayer titles, with potentially hundreds of thousands of players a piece.
FFXIV launched on Xbox platforms for the first time this year, and Dawntrail is the first new expansion to be released on Microsoft’s consoles.
Similarly, The First Descendant, a brand new title, has seen high peaks of players on other platforms, such as Steam, where the game was the fifth most-played title with almost 230,000 players today.
Image Credit: NEXON Games Co., Ltd.
Xbox released a statement on their support account at around 22:45 BST (17:45 EDT):
“Investigation continues into issues impacting users ability to sign in to Xbox Live and services. Thank you for your patience while our engineers work.”
This was following a previous post which stated that the investigation was taking longer than expected. At that time, the outage had lasted for just over three hours. You might not need Xbox Live to play Fortnite, but it’s affecting a lot of other games, which is frustrating for many players.
As of writing, the outage appears to only affect logging on to the platform, so if you’re already in-game, you shouldn’t be affected. This is no consolation to the thousands of players currently locked out of Xbox Live by the issues.
LOL
CS2
Dota 2
Valorant
Fortnite
Call of Duty
Mobile Games
Gaming
EN Global 
JP 日本語
love how they forced everyone into digital content so when something on their end happens, we’re just fucked