This Xbox Outage Was As Bad As Everyone Is Saying

Xbox Live had a rough go of it over the weekend, with reports of outages covering an almost 36 hours period. Anyone familiar with modern consoles and video games will know that services occasionally have unplanned outages, and while fans are usually still upset, these outages don't last too long. Unfortunately for Xbox, issues started on Friday evening, with players reporting that they could not play any of their digital games, and were receiving messages that the person who bought the game needed to sign in. There were signs of resolution early Saturday, but the service quickly had issues again, resulting in the outage lasting until Sunday. This resulted in a bunch of Xbox owners being unable to play any games on their consoles over the weekend, which brought up some issues with always-online consoles.

Fans had a variety of reactions to these outages. While Xbox revolutionized online gaming for consoles with Xbox Live, the service itself has reached a point where some people question the need for it. Xbox Live Gold isn't even required for free-to-play games anymore. There have been rumors that Xbox Live Gold will go away eventually, but for now people feel even more upset that they couldn't access a service they pay for over several days. On top of that, people can't access the games they paid for. Now, fans want to know how Microsoft is going to deal with these issues moving forward.

Over the course of the weekend, there were many threads about the outages on Reddit, with Xbox players reporting their issues and others lamenting their inability to play. One thread began with the person writing, "Every game I 'own,' I can't play because the network is down. I feel really stupid for not realizing how scary that really is sooner." Others complained about how dismissive some people are about the issues of digital games not working without a connection to Xbox Live.

As some people pointed out, this issue had a higher chance of happening if you were playing on a console that isn't set as your home Xbox. Players who had their own console set as the home Xbox reported being able to play their digital games without issue. Of course, that system isn't flawless either. Some people have other Xboxes set as their home console, maybe because they have multiple consoles or they are sharing their digital library with another person. People get a limited number of changes, so wasting two of them switching your home Xbox back and forth whenever there is an outage isn't a great system. Microsoft has not publicly stated what caused the long outage.