Microsoft’s Xbox Live service is unavailable, preventing users from signing in to the service. The Xbox Live issues started around 3:15 p.m. ET today and Microsoft has confirmed it is investigating the outage. “We are aware that users may not be able to sign in to Xbox Live at this time,” Xbox Support said. “Our teams are currently investigating how to resolve this issue.”
If you are not already signed in to your Xbox, the sign-in process will fail with an error, preventing access to certain services, such as Xbox Party chat. Also, some apps may not launch without the main Xbox Live services being online, and some games will not launch properly either.
Microsoft has marked the Xbox Live issues as a “major glitch” on the company’s Xbox status page. The outage also means services like xCloud cloud gaming are offline in addition to access to multiplayer games.
We are aware that users may not be able to sign in to Xbox Live at this time. Our teams are currently investigating to resolve this issue. We will update here and at https://t.co/PzAdjUFMJj when we have more information to share!
– Xbox support (@XboxSupport) February 25, 2021
This is the first major outage of Xbox Live since problems occurred during the launch of the Xbox Series X and Series S in November last year. Xbox Live also went off the air a few times in 2020, especially at the start of the pandemic when the service faced problems twice a week as millions of people distanced themselves socially.