Xbox service is down, with outages meaning players can't play any digital or physical games, after similar PlayStation Network issues last week - Eurogamer.net

What the report says

Eurogamer reports that Xbox online services are experiencing a major outage, affecting core features across Microsoft’s console ecosystem shortly after a similar disruption hit PlayStation Network last week. According to the Xbox live status page cited by Eurogamer, the affected categories include “account & profile,” “store & subscriptions,” “games & gaming,” and “apps & mobile.”

The disruption may prevent some players from signing in, browsing the store, opening the Xbox mobile app, or playing downloaded, disc-based and backwards-compatible games. Eurogamer notes that multiplayer, cloud-based games and some sharing features appeared not to be affected. The official Xbox support account on X said some users were seeing errors when trying to sign in, access their libraries or start games, and that engineers were working on the problem.

Eurogamer said it tested its own console and did not encounter problems launching games, but reported that the warning was visible on the console homepage. The outlet also cited user reports on the Xbox subreddit from around 5am BST, where players criticized the outage and questioned why locally owned or physical games could be affected by online service problems.

The outage matters because it comes amid wider debate in gaming over digital ownership, DRM and console makers’ increasing reliance on online authentication. Eurogamer also places the incident in the context of Microsoft’s recent gaming-division layoffs and said it had contacted Xbox for further comment and details on the service disruption.