Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One gamers will be disappointed to find Xbox Live is having a few major outages at the moment. Throughout the late afternoon/evening of May 6, players are finding themselves unable to play digital games or use the Xbox Store in any way as the Xbox Live servers are down for these features. There are also issues with playing games through Xbox Cloud Gaming.
Several major Xbox Live outages
The Xbox Status page currently lists a grand total of 14 major outages across their services. Players may find themselves unable to play their downloaded digital games, while it seems like cloud gaming is having similar issues. Two major outages there describe how players may not be able to launch games on the cloud, and those that do may find themselves “unexpectedly disconnected” shortly after the game begins. The majority of the issues are occurring on the Xbox Store, though. Players won’t be able to buy games to own, including Game Pass games and backward compatible games. There’s also no way to buy accessories, subscriptions (including Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Live Gold), in-game purchases, or DLC. In something that comes as no surprise, there are also issues with purchasing through credit cards or store wallets too.
Microsoft is currently working on the issues and there’s no indication as to when a solution will be found at the time of writing. The outage in cloud gaming is a bit of an embarrassment for a company that only yesterday was describing how well Xbox Cloud Gaming has grown since it was introduced in 2020. Their Xbox Everywhere initiative aims to “empower everyone around the world to play the games they want, with the people they want, on the devices they already own” in the future.
In other news, Fortnite is one of those games that is now playable for free on all devices through Xbox Cloud Gaming, including iPhones and iPads. Elsewhere, Xbox was also running free play days for three games, including Civilization VI and Overcooked! All You Can Eat.
