Xbox Live outage: Servers down and players forced to look at strange error messages instead of playing games

Users complained their consoles had become unusable because of problems with online service

Xbox Live is down, forcing people to look at strange error messages rather than play games.

The problem means that people are unable to use their console at all, since logging in is required even to play games that are on the console.

There does not appear to be any obvious fix to the problems. Some players said they had attempted to fix issues with matchmaking and other features by logging out – but then found themselves unable to log back in again at all.

The official Xbox Twitter account acknowledged specific issues with downloading content. It had not mentioned the more general issues with signing on at all at the time of publication.

"We've seen your reports about issues accesing your previously purchased games, movies & TV," it wrote. "We have teams working on it now. We'll update you as soon as we can with more details."

The Xbox Live server status page carried similar warnings, indicating issues with "buying items, redeeming codes, or downloading purchases" as well as TV, music and video. It also indicated there was a problem with the "my games and apps" option, though that carried a strangely unspecific warning.

"Hello Xbox members, we’re currently experiencing an issue," it read. "We apologise for the inconvenience. Please check back for updates."

The same page claimed however that logging in and playing games were working as normal. But numerous people complained on Twitter – including in posts to the official Xbox account – that they were unable to get onto their console at all because of issues with the Xbox servers.

Specific games did however recognise problems with matchmaking and gameplay.

"Hi everyone. We are aware some players are experiencing matchmaking and commerce issues and are investigating," wrote Sea of Thieves.

Some players reported that when they tried to log in, the system said they were unable to get online and showed an error message. But if they tried to search for that error message to find more details, the code did not seem to be in Microsoft's troubleshooting system.