Xbox Live was down for more than five hours

Microsoft’s Xbox Live service went down for more than five hours today, preventing users from signing in to the service. The Xbox Live problems started at around 3:15PM ET today, and Microsoft confirmed it was investigating the outage. The Xbox Live status page was updated at 9.49PM ET to say that all services are now up and running.

If you weren’t already signed in to your Xbox, the sign-in process would fail with an error, preventing access to certain services like Party Chat. Some apps may also fail to launch without the core Xbox Live services being online, and a number of games will also not launch correctly.

Microsoft marked the Xbox Live issues as a “major outage” over at the company’s Xbox status page. The outage also meant services like xCloud cloud gaming were offline, alongside access to multiplayer games.

At that status page, Microsoft admitted that the fix is “taking longer than anticipated.”

This is the first big Xbox Live outage since issues occurred during the Xbox Series X and Series S launch in November last year. Xbox Live also went down a few times throughout 2020, particularly at the beginning of the pandemic when the service faced issues twice in a week as millions started social distancing.

Update February 25th, 8:20PM ET: Added new details from Microsoft and updated headline to note the length of the outage.

Update February 25th, 9:50PM ET: Added confirmation that the outage has been fixed.