Xbox One gamers worldwide experienced Xbox Live outages, but Microsoft announced that it fixed the issue and the service is now back up.
Xbox Live services went down for several hours in a number of regions worldwide, leaving gamers unable to sign in, thus unable to play anything online.
Gamers started to report Xbox Live outage issues on Thursday, Oct. 1, and Microsoft soon confirmed that it was indeed experiencing some downtime. The company said it was aware of the problem and working on fixing it as quickly as possible. It now seems that everything is back up and running, at least for the time being, but the occurrence highlights the negative aspect of Xbox Live's close ties with the Xbox One and Xbox 360 consoles.
Several online issues resulted in brief outages over the past month and affected both the Xbox 360 and the Xbox One consoles because they depend on Xbox Live. If users are not able to sign in, they can't play any game online either, and the issue is even worse considering that many single-player titles also rely on third-party server connections. At the same time, the outages also leave users unable to use their console as an entertainment hub.
The Verge's Tom Warren raised this issue and got a response from Microsoft's Phil Spencer, who acknowledged that minimal dependency between the two services would be preferable.
During the outage, the Xbox Live Service Page displayed an alert for gamers using the service on the Xbox One, Xbox on Windows 10 or Xbox on Other Devices, suggesting that it was a large-scale outage.
Microsoft's Xbox Live status page now shows the services as up and running, but it still displays an alert message for IGN on Xbox 360, which is still limited for now.
"Hey Xbox members, are you seeing an error screen and having to press 'Retry' in order to launch the IGN application, or experiencing latency when playing content in the app? We are aware of the issue and working with our partner to find a fix," notes the alert.
At the same time, in some cases, some features such as Friends List may not be fully operational just yet. Some users also reported being back up but not receiving any notifications from their friends.
