Xbox Live outage resolved after players cut off for six hours

After recently trying to charge gamers even more so they can play online, Microsoft’s services went down for six hours in an outage it took “longer than anticipated” to fix.

Xbox Live is back online after a six-hour outage that baffled even the company that runs the service.

Users were unable to sign into the service during the outage.

The outage affected people’s ability to play online as well as launch a variety of games and apps correctly.

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We are aware that users may not be able to sign-in to Xbox Live at this time. Our teams are currently investigating to fix this issue. We will update here and on https://t.co/PzAdjUFMJj when we have more information to share!

— Xbox Support (@XboxSupport) February 25, 2021

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“We are aware that users may not be able to sign-in on Xbox Live at this time. Our teams are currently investigating to fix this issue,” Xbox Support said on Twitter on Friday morning.

The outage caused problems for many who took to social media to complain, though their issue was not always with the service itself.

I just finished work and my chores for the day. Now my wife is going to make me do more chores. Please fix quickly.

— Doug Delony (@DougDelonyKHOU) February 25, 2021

Me after restarting my router, my xbox 3 times, doing a full reset twice and coming to twitter seeing Xbox live is down pic.twitter.com/rIXBzEzz0o

— A1 (@dpnny_) February 25, 2021

Xbox servers down 🙃 pic.twitter.com/Yg4yFBy94q

— George Kittle (@gkittle46) February 26, 2021

Me going to see if Xbox Live servers are still down for the 12th time this hour pic.twitter.com/EkRsmuPwQ9

— Spencer T (@SpencerT401613) February 26, 2021

When Xbox Live is down and a new season of Cold War is out pic.twitter.com/J4WJ4hkuo7

— Connor Walsh (@smallclub_) February 25, 2021

Me coming home from a long day of working for the man to find out Xbox live down pic.twitter.com/tcvIXfw2BB

— Twitch: TheBethanos (@__HIEM__) February 26, 2021

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Microsoft declared it a major outage on the Xbox status page, which it later updated to say a fix was “taking longer than anticipated”.

The status page was updated again after 2pm to say that “all services (were) up and running”.

The outage lasted almost as long as Microsoft’s plans to up the prices for how much they charge people to use the service, which is required to play online multiplayer.

After announcing price increases in January, the company admitted it had made a mistake and withdrew the plans, 14 hours after they were announced, following a furious backlash from gamers.

The outage couldn’t have come at a worse time for Microsoft as it provided the perfect circumstances for PlayStation to lure in gamers from the rival platform when it announced more new games coming to its console on Friday morning.

Originally published as Xbox Live outage resolved after players cut off for six hours