Some Xbox users are reporting that they cannot play or purchase games. The problem started on Friday and persisted throughout the weekend.
Users first encountered the outage on Friday with Microsoft tweeting that they “have the right people investigating” the issue on Friday night. Microsoft also acknowledged on Saturday morning that some users reported difficulty accessing media streaming apps such as Netflix and Disney+ on Xbox consoles.
However, as The Verge editor Tom Warren noted in a tweet on Saturday, the outage extended to users who tried to launch games that they owned or start Xbox Cloud Gaming. The latter is a paid service connected with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscriptions.
Xbox has been experiencing a major outage for 9 hours and counting, affecting some people launching games or starting Xbox Cloud Gaming sessions. Some people have been getting errors that they don’t own a game. Microsoft says it’s investigating the service issues https://t.co/PFOJQEn0G7 pic.twitter.com/gGraJWhJuH
— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) May 7, 2022
Incredibly, the issues have extended into Monday. That’s four calendar days of downtime for some users. Although they say that there is “significant improvement” in resolving the issue, it looks like it could take several more days to resolve the issues.
Here’s what the official @XboxSupport Twitter account tweeted today:
We’ve seen significant improvement to the issue that has prevented some users from purchasing and launching games. We expect full mitigation in the coming days with the roll out of a new update.
However, the xbox.com/status page currently does not show any outages, which conflicts with the tweet. We’ll continue to monitor this story and provide updates as we learn more from Microsoft.
My Take
It looks like Microsoft’s DRM is once again in the spotlight as fans rightly complain that they cannot play offline games. It’s understandable that online components will occasionally have downtime. However, there’s not much excuse for offline games that are either disc-based or purchased through the Microsoft Store.
