Unexpectedly, Xbox Live has gone down just ahead of February 25's PlayStation State of Play, which is poor timing to say the very least. The outage is reportedly preventing players from signing into their accounts, and the reason for the outage is not yet known.
Although Microsoft continues to increasingly lean into its reliance on Xbox Game Pass as the future of its gaming division, the online framework that makes the company's growing success and popularity possible is Xbox Live. Though it doesn't go down often, players understandably notice and report outages online as soon as it does. The last, most notable Xbox Live outage was one of similarly poor timing, with the service having gone offline during Xbox Series X/S's launch day.
On Twitter, Xbox Support confirmed myriad user reports that Xbox Live went down on Thursday, February 25, not allowing users to sign in. According to Xbox Status, this is a full-blown outage that has ground the core of the service and its paid offerings to a halt. At publication time, Xbox Store, profile, online multiplayer, and cloud gaming services are unavailable. The support team says it is currently investigating the outage, and there's no estimate on when Xbox Live will resume normal function.
The reason for Xbox Live going down could be anything from the mundane to the malicious. While admirably flexible under even considerable holiday strain, both Xbox Live and PSN have been brought down by intentional attacks by bad actors in the past. However, being that these online services are mandatory in order to enjoy many gaming experiences to their fullest and users pay $60 a month for them, outages like this Xbox Live one are understandably frustrating for players. That frustration is often particularly compounded among Xbox players when Microsoft's services go down, as the original movement towards charging for online connectivity and multiplayer gaming can be traced back to the company's own successful efforts, with a justification having been that paid online services are less likely to go down than free ones.
While big outages like this one tend to not last long, there's so far no ETA from Microsoft on when Xbox Live services will resume normal, stable function. Players waiting to resume online play and make purchases should keep an eye on the Xbox Status site and any further updates from the Xbox Support team.
Source: Xbox Support