Xbox Live takes Sunday night off
Console owners frozen out after the Xbox Live service suffers a major blackout
A major outage left console owners without access to the Xbox Live service last night. Problems first started being reported in the early evening UK time, with Xbox 360 and Xbox One owners across the globe unable to log in to Microsoft’s online gaming service.
Xbox games are increasingly reliant on Xbox Live, with many titles unable to function unless the player’s profile can be loaded. Yesterday’s outage lasted much of the evening, leaving Xbox owners seeking alternative entertainment…
“Xbox Live goes down and I had to speak to my wife,” tweeted @DrScottJMcGrane. “She seems nice.”
The Xbox Support account on Twitter said the company was “working hard on the current issues signing in to Xbox Live” at around 7pm BST last night, before reporting “sign in across devices should be back to normal!” around three hours later. Yet, even later into the evening, the Xbox Support account tweeted that the company was “working hard to make sure you can access all of your game & app content”.
This morning, the Xbox Service Status page reports all is back to normal with the core services, although problems persist with the IGN application at the time of publication. Microsoft hasn’t issued any comment on the cause of last night’s outage.
Last Christmas, the Xbox Live service was taken down by a denial-of-service attack, which also wiped out the PlayStation Network for much of Christmas Day. A hacking group called the Lizard Squad claimed responsibility for taking down the services.