Xbox service is down, with outages meaning players can't play any digital or physical games, after similar PlayStation Network issues last week
Xbox services are experiencing a major outage, preventing users from accessing digital and physical games. This follows similar recent issues with the PlayStation Network and has sparked concerns regarding the reliability of digital-only gaming models.
Why it matters
Highlights the vulnerability of modern gaming infrastructure and the consumer debate over digital rights management (DRM).
Xbox's live status page currently shows the 'account & profile', 'store & subscriptions', 'games & gaming', and 'apps & mobile' services are all down with a 'major outage'. Other parts of the online infrastructure, such as multiplayer and cloud-based games, as well as some functionality like sharing screenshots and captures, are seemingly untouched by the outage.
In practical terms, this means users may, per the warning, struggle to do the following: sign in; view games in the store; play downloaded games, disc-based games, and backwards-compatible games; and launch the Xbox mobile app.
As noted by VGC , the official Xbox support account on X has confirmed "some users are encountering errors when attempting to sign in, see your game library, or launch games". Engineers are now working on the case, but it's currently unknown if this will be a quick and easy fix or something that will last longer.
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