Xbox Live Suffers Widespread Outage, Xbox Support ‘Investigating’

Xbox Live is currently down, affecting thousands of gaming fans.

Players who attempted to log into their accounts this afternoon found they were unable to sign in and play games as usual. Microsoft describes the incident as a “major outage” on its official Xbox Live status page. The company says troubles with its service began just after 2 p.m. ET, with the website Downdetector reporting a peak of more than 38,000 individual outage reports around 3 p.m. ET.

Though a select few have shared that they’ve been able to eventually sign into Xbox Live, Microsoft says the sign-in issues affect Xbox Series X | S, Xbox One, and Xbox 360 consoles as well as mobile devices, web services, cloud gaming, backward compatibility, and Xbox on Windows. No explanation for the outage has been shared, but in the meantime, Microsoft said in an X/Twitter post that it is investigating the issue while directing concerned players to head to its status page for updates.

Our investigation is taking longer than expected, thank you for your patience and reports! We’ll continue to update here and on our status page, https://t.co/kQKp1MgssY https://t.co/nNYKQKZcxL

— Xbox Support (@XboxSupport) July 2, 2024

“You may not be able to sign-in to your Xbox profile, may be disconnected while signed in, or have other related problems,” the status page says at the time of this story’s publication. “Features that require sign-in like most games, apps and social activity won’t be available.”

A widespread Xbox Live outage means there are thousands of gamers with questions and time on their hands. Many have them quickly took to social media to share memes while looking for answers. Although they’re all in the same boat as they wait for Microsoft to chime in with good news, many are just happy to see they aren’t the only ones faced with gaming downtime.

me checking twitter to make sure Xbox live is down for others as well, and it’s not just me pic.twitter.com/aqfbXn4KX0

— 𝕏epyal 🇨🇾🇬🇷 (@xepyal) July 2, 2024

Everyone rushing to Twitter/X to see if Xbox Live is down. pic.twitter.com/w2sBW6nRCn

— Andrew Stow (@AndrewStow23969) July 2, 2024

My Minecraft Horse waiting for me to return because Xbox Live is down 🥲 @XboxSupport pic.twitter.com/2OLIoq2A1D

— Garrett ✨ (@gxrrettmxrtinez) July 2, 2024

We’ll update this story when Microsoft has an update on the status of Xbox Live. In the meantime, you can check out the recently confirmed Xbox Game Pass lineup for July 2024. You can also see our IGN Live interview with CEO Phil Spencer, where we learned more about the company’s plans for the future.

Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor with IGN. He started writing in the industry in 2017 and is best known for his work at outlets such as The Pitch, The Escapist, OnlySP, and Gameranx.

Be sure to give him a follow on Twitter @MikeCripe.