Microsoft’s Xbox platform went down Thursday night, with many players unable to sign in or connect to online games.
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If you’re trying to play online games on your Xbox Series X / S, Xbox One, or even Xbox 360 right now, you might be running into some issues, as Xbox confirmed there was a “major” Xbox Live outage on its status page as of 6:57PM ET.
“You may not be able to sign-in to your Xbox profile, may be disconnected while signed in, or have other related problems,” according to a status message. “Features that require sign-in like most games, apps and social activity won’t be available.” For players who could sign into their accounts on consoles, online-connected games couldn’t connect and showed their own Xbox sign-in errors, while other people reported issues with features like remote play.
As of 8:20PM ET, Xbox also says the outage affects the Xbox Store and subscriptions. “You may not be able to buy games to own right now,” according to a status message.
“We are seeing improvement to sign-in, but impact to matchmaking and completing purchases continues,” the Xbox Support account said on X at 8:06PM ET.
It’s unclear if there’s any link, but Microsoft is dealing with a couple other outages, too. Microsoft is reporting issues with “multiple Azure services in the Central US region” as of about 5:56PM ET. The company is also dealing with Microsoft 365 problems that might prevent users from accessing “various Microsoft 365 apps and services,” though as of 10:29PM ET, the company says things there are improving.
The issues are having a major impact for Frontier Airlines, which says on its website and on X that “our systems are currently impacted by a Microsoft outage, which is also affecting other companies.” The Federal Aviation Administration grounded Frontier flights but lifted the ground stop after 10PM ET, CNN reports.
Downdetector is tracking a peak of more than 7,000 user reports of problems with Xbox Live, but that number has trended lower over the course of a few hours.
This outage follows another from earlier this month that prevented users from playing online games and lasted several hours.
Updates, July 18th: Added details from Xbox and about other Microsoft outages.
