- Xbox Live went down for about two hours on Xbox Series X|S launch day.
- Microsoft didn’t say what caused the problem, but in the middle of the day on Tuesday, people were having trouble signing into Xbox Live and playing games.
- In addition to Xbox Live, a few games had their own connectivity issues as well, including Destiny 2 and Rogue Company, but it’s unclear if these are related.
Launch day is always chaotic in the world of video games. Whether it’s a new title with online multiplayer or next-gen console that connects to the internet, something inevitably goes wrong, and that appears to be the case for Microsoft as it launches the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S on Tuesday. Starting at around 1 p.m. ET, Xbox Live went down as the status page explained that an outage was affecting the core services of the platform.
“We’re aware that users are currently unable to sign into Xbox Live on various platforms,” the support team said in a tweet. “The right teams are looking into the issue and working on a fix.”
According to the support team, the outage began at 1:01 p.m. ET and they began “closing in on a fix” at 2:33 p.m. ET. Shortly before 3:00 p.m. ET, the team pushed out a fix, and at the time of writing, there no longer appear to be issues directly related to the Xbox Live platform. Here was the final tweet in relation to the outage:
Users should now be able to sign into Xbox Live on all platforms. Thanks for hanging in there while things got sorted out. Please give it another try and let us know if you're still running into issues. We're here an listening. https://t.co/cTnFVSigmD
— Xbox Support (@XboxSupport) November 10, 2020
Microsoft hasn’t said anything about what might have caused the outage, but it’s worth noting that at least two games ran into trouble as well. Hi-Rez Studios — the team behind Rogue Company — began reporting problems at around 2:00 p.m. ET, but resolved those problems at around the same time as Microsoft.
Meanwhile, Destiny 2 has been running into snags all day long as developer Bungie attempts to roll out a patch for its huge Beyond Light expansion that also launches on Tuesday. As of 3:00 p.m. ET, Bungie is “continuing to investigate various error codes and connectivity issues.” Bungie has yet to provide a timeline for a fix.
It’s important to give these companies a bit of leeway on the first day as countless consumers all attempt to log on, make accounts, and play games at the exact same time. If you live in the US, chances are you are still at work or at school anyway, so at least wait until you have a chance to unbox the console and plug it in before you start tweeting or emailing anyone about connectivity issues. As long as everything is up and running by the weekend, we should all be ok. If this is the worst of it, then Microsoft dodged a bullet, as we have seen much, much worse launches than a couple of hours of downtime in the middle of the day on launch day.
