Xbox Live is back following major outage

A widespread Xbox Live outage lasting several hours has now been resolved. The issue prevented players from signing into their accounts and downloading or playing online games. “Users should once again be able to sign in, matchmake and complete purchases,” Xbox Support said on X at 11.24PM ET. “Thank you for sticking with us!”

Xbox had earlier confirmed there was a “major” Xbox Live outage on its status page as of 6:57PM ET, warning players they may experience issues with signing into their user profiles, or being disconnected. At 8:20PM ET, Xbox also said the outage was affecting Xbox Store and subscriptions. “You may not be able to buy games to own right now,” according to a status message.

For players who could sign into their accounts on consoles, online-connected games couldn’t connect and showed their own Xbox sign-in errors, while other people reported issues with features like remote play.

Microsoft is also dealing with a couple of other, seemingly unrelated outages. The company reported issues with “multiple Azure services in the Central US region” as of about 5:56PM ET on Thursday. Thousands of Windows machines are also experiencing a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) issue as of Friday morning, which has taken some banks, airlines, and broadcasters offline globally.

This outage follows another from earlier this month that prevented users from playing online games and lasted several hours.

Updates, July 19th: Added details about resolution and other Microsoft outages.