Xbox Live suffered from a nearly seven-hour outage

 Xbox Live suffered from a nearly seven-hour outage

UPDATE, 7/2, 9:01 p.m. ET: Microsoft has resolved the technical issues that caused a nearly seven-hour outage of Xbox Live. "Users should no longer be encountering issues signing in to Xbox Live and services," the Xbox Support account posted on X at 8:49 p.m. ET. "Thank you for your patience, game on!"

EARLIER:

Xbox Live, Microsoft’s multiplayer gaming and digital media network, experienced a major outage Tuesday, with thousands of users reporting problems accessing the service.

According to monitoring site Downdetector, user-reported issues with Xbox Live began to surge around 2:15 p.m. ET. By 2:25 p.m., over 23,000 outage reports had been logged, with more than 3/4 indicating issues with logging in. Some users received an error message stating that the service was undergoing "scheduled maintenance."

Other Microsoft services, including Minecraft and the Microsoft Store, also experienced high levels of user error reports on Downdetector.

At 2:55 p.m. ET, the official Xbox Support account on X posted, "We are aware some users have been disconnected from Xbox Live. We’re investigating!" The message directed users to the Xbox status page, which was eventually updated to report a major outage of the “Account & profile” service at 2:07 p.m. ET. The update stated, "You may not able to sign in to your Xbox profile, may be disconnected while signed in, or have other related problems. Features that require sign-in like most games, apps, and social activity won’t be available."

Microsoft requires users to have an Xbox Live account (which is free to set up) to play games online and access other experiences on the Xbox console, Windows PC, and Xbox mobile apps.

Xbox Live users took to social media to express their frustration over the technical problems.