As the world reacts to the growing threat of the coronavirus pandemic, many in the United States (who are home to self-quarantine) discover that Microsoft's Xbox Live service is down. As the country struggles to outpace the rate of infection for the coronavirus, experts are encouraging people to practice "social distancing," meaning self-isolation to prevent the spread of the virus. As a result, a lot of people are sitting at home on their Xbox consoles.
Xbox Live is Microsoft's online gaming hub that connects players and allows them to play online-only games, sometimes even for free. However, the Live servers also handle a lot of the connectivity aspects of the Xbox console. Everything from using the store to downloading items and playing games depends on Xbox Live servers. Outages are not uncommon on Xbox Live and can range from a few seconds to a few hours to fix.
The Verge reports that Xbox Live servers are down. At about 5 pm EST, Xbox Support tweeted acknowledgment that many users were "experiencing errors with sign in or match making on Xbox Live." The account promises they're "currently investigating" and asks players to "check back here for details." Additionally, it appears that Xbox Live support is also offline, which was noted in a separate tweet. Meanwhile, Express.co reports users are also having trouble signing in on Xbox One consoles. They note Microsoft provided an update saying, "Our engineers and developers are actively continuing to work to resolve the issue causing some members to have problems signing in to Xbox Live. Stay tuned, and thanks for your patience."
To make matters worse, maybe Call of Duty: Warzone players are also reporting server issues, along with a handful of other multiplayer games. Microsoft has yet to outline the problem but appears to be working hard to address it. With so many people around the globe being forced to take time off work and school thanks to coronavirus there might be a major strain on servers like this for some time.
This is the second time in just a couple of days that the servers have gone down, and the timing coincides with coronavirus concerns. With more users home and online than ever before, Xbox Live isn't the only streaming service gamers have flooded. Steam usage records were recently broken, as the gaming service announced the most concurrent users online at one time.
Source: The Verge, Express.co, Xbox Support via Twitter