Xbox Live was down for more than 5 hours , affecting many of its features .
The Xbox Live outage occurred on Thursday afternoon, which is a key time zone for gaming in the U.S.Fortunately, nearly all Xbox Live services, including online games, began to come back online shortly after, according to Microsoft. Two games, Rouge Company and Rec Room, are still experiencing some issues.
What happened?
According to the official Microsoft Xbox website, Xbox Live went down with most of its services affected. The online gaming was down for more than five hours.
“We are aware that users may be unable to connect to Xbox Live at this time,” the Xbox support page said via its official Twitter account . “Our teams are currently investigating to fix this issue.”
The Xbox Live outage began around 4 p.m. EST, according to a tweet from the support page, as well as intense complaints from gamers about sudden disconnections. Many people who recently purchased the new Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S consoles were able to get online later in the afternoon.
Microsoft's website reported that Xbox Live was down for about five and a half hours, affecting some of its core functions. Across the online gaming community, there was no access to account and profile information, the Xbox store or its subscription service, as well as multiplayer games and cloud gaming. This included Xbox Game Pass, which has been heavily promoted by Microsoft.
In other words, those who owned an Xbox Series X, Series S, or Xbox One didn't have many Xbox Live features, but some remained intact. For example, "Friends and social activity" didn't go down. There's still no official announcement from the company about what caused the outage.
