Xbox Live Down: Second Major Outage This Month Prevents Users From Downloading, Playing Games
For the second time in the month of February, 2016, Xbox Live services have gone down, Hackread reports. In what seems to be a major downtime, Xbox Live services across the globe seem to have gone down – and no specific reason have been cited as being the cause. This downtime came hours after another similar downtime hit Xbox Live services last night. According to an update from the Xbox Live status page, currently the services that remain affected include downloading things you’ve purchased, making purchases, and doing things like viewing your balance or adding currency to your wallet.
However, many users have complained on Social Media websites that they are also unable to open digital games on their Xbox One. Several users confirm that when trying to start a game, an error message saying the game cannot be “started for some reason” appears and then throws up an error code – which is not listed on the Xbox Live website.
Here are a few tweets from affected users.
Ahhhh c’mon #XboxLive down AGAIN, ffs nightmare, cant play or watch anything, sort it out PLEASE!!!!
— Stu L Robson (@PapaRoppa1977) February 22, 2016
I come back home from a place with no internet and find that Xbox Live is down. #firstworldproblems
????????????????????— ???XX??? (@RoxxieToxxic) February 22, 2016
Whenever Xbox Live goes down, I can’t use any of the apps on my console. Why is everything tied to that? I just want to watch Netflix.
— Craig Dennis (@craigmdennis) February 22, 2016
What a shock.. Xbox Live is down. #ShouldHaveGotAPS4
— B e c k a (@becka_taylor) February 22, 2016
While the official Xbox Live Status page acknowledges a problem, it has not explicitly said that users are unable to start their games. A section in the “latest updates” section of the Xbox Live status website reads the following.
“Are you having a tough time launching previously purchased content or purchasing new content, Xbox members? We’re aware of the issue and our team is working hard to fix things as quickly as possible.”
As evident from the tweets posted by the official Xbox Live twitter handle, at the time of publishing this article, Xbox Live services have been down for over 8 hours and it still hasn’t been fixed. Microsoft continues to say that their engineers are working to fix the problem while refusing to reveal what is actually happening.
Are you unable to purchase/download items from the marketplace? The right teams are on the case! Check: https://t.co/99xfLMWcZW for info!
— Xbox Support (1-5) (@XboxSupport) February 22, 2016
We thank you for hanging in there as we investigate sign in/accessing content on Xbox One. Stay tuned to: https://t.co/99xfLMWcZW for info!
— Xbox Support (1-5) (@XboxSupport) February 22, 2016
The official Twitter handle confirms that currently they do not have an ETA by when they intend to solve the problem.
@0ff_Tone We don’t have an ETA for resolution, but you can check for updates here: https://t.co/PzAdjUFMJj ^JZ
— Xbox Support (1-5) (@XboxSupport) February 23, 2016
Alarmingly, the news of this latest Xbox Live Services downtime comes just a week after New World Hackers (NWH) claimed responsibility for conducting a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on Xbox Live service. That incident also forced several users to take to Twitter and complain about the issue. Back in July 2015, The Inquisitr had reported about a similar Xbox Live Services outage that lasted for several hours. Back then, users encountered several different error messages while trying to access their Xbox Live Services page.
It remains unclear if the rather long downtime this time round is the result of such a DDoS attack or whether the problem has been caused by a technical glitch on Microsoft’s end.
Are you an Xbox Live user? If yes, please do share your experience pertaining to this latest downtime in the comments section below.
[Image Via Pixabay]