You may encounter errors when attempting to play games on your Xbox One or Xbox 360 this evening.
Xbox Live isn’t function properly for many people today, according to complaints from gamers on social media. Many are reporting an issue where they have difficulty signing into Microsoft’s online gaming service. If they do get logged in, Xbox Live typically disconnects shortly after. Other people are primarily having troubles with parties where they can’t invite friends to join them for multiplayer sessions.
Microsoft has not updated the Xbox Live status page to reflect this outage, but the company’s social media presence on Twitter confirmed that it is working on a fix.
Hey there, thanks for coming in, this is something we're aware of and investigating 🙂 ^NX
— Xbox Support (@XboxSupport) February 14, 2017
This doesn’t appear to be a major issue, and it’s likely that most people will have no trouble getting online. But it is affecting enough people that Microsoft has acknowledged it.
For Xbox Live, this is a rare outage in 2017. The service has not experienced any real downtime from the holidays through the first two months of this year. That’s compared to Sony’s PlayStation Network, which has already had five significant outages since the beginning of January.
Regardless, millions of people pay for access to premium online features from Microsoft, and any disruption in service is an inconvenience. The company has begun advertising Xbox Live as “the fastest, most reliable gaming network.” Those claims have largely panned out as true — especially in light of Microsoft’s recent efforts to increase download speeds for games from the Xbox store. But, again, almost any network-wide error will cause headaches for paying customers, and that is something Microsoft will have to address immediately.