Xbox Live went down again, the second time this week
Xbox Live went down again, according to the Xbox team and lots of reports on social media. This is the second time in just a few days. The outage lasted approximately two hours, and the service appears to be back up now — save a few lingering errors:
Our teams are aware & currently investigating errors when updating the Xbox One console. We’ll update here & on our status page: https://t.co/PzAdjUFMJj when we have more info to share.
— Xbox Support (@XboxSupport) August 30, 2019
The initial outage today mainly affected sign-ins, account creations, and searches, according to a tweet from the Xbox team, but those sign-ins are required to play lots of popular online games.
Things are looking better with sign in now, so feel free to try again! Thanks to everyone that reported this to us. As always, we’re here & listening. https://t.co/lhbNOlMGFz
— Xbox Support (@XboxSupport) August 30, 2019
This kind of outage doesn’t just affect games like Destiny 2 or Fortnite, which require people to sign in to Xbox Live. Apps for Xbox such as Spotify, Plex, and Amazon Video also require people to sign in to an Xbox One console. Microsoft’s last Xbox Live outage prevented people from signing in to these apps as well.
Sites like DownDetector, which are used by people to determine if there’s an outage affecting a number of people, also show spikes in games from EA, like Apex Legends, and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. This shows a correlation between Xbox Live being down and people being unable to play their games.
When Xbox Live went down two days ago, it took the team some time to get everything back up. Prior to that, Xbox Live’s service was down for a couple of hours in January, which also caused black screens for many people.
Update August 30th at 6:13PM ET: Xbox Live is no longer down, but updated to reflect a new lingering issue.