Xbox Support has acknowledged widespread issues with Xbox servers, as users are unable to log into their accounts. Affected users say they can't play games they bought digitally, effectively locking Xbox Series S owners out of doing anything.
Many are angry that it took Xbox so long to acknowledge the outages, and hope that a fix will be rolled out soon. Right now, there's no word on how long the outage will last, meaning many will have to cancel any plans to play their Xbox games today.
Can't sign in to your Xbox account? You are not alone
According to the Xbox Support website, problems signing in and using the Xbox Store were reported at 4am BST. Xbox says it began working on the repair in the afternoon, meaning many players wouldn't be able to play anything late Sunday.
This comes shortly after a more widespread PSN outage left everyone unable to play online or access their digital libraries on PlayStation. This comes after PlayStation announced it would go all-digital from 2028, scrapping physical game releases and, presumably, making the PS6 a digital-only console without a disc drive. If this happened in the PS6 era, nobody would be able to play anything while the servers were down.
Xbox hasn't confirmed whether or not it will follow in PlayStation's footsteps, but it already has its own digital-only console in the Series S. It has tried to push users towards Xbox Game Pass, a subscription service that will only work if the servers are running, so it's clear that Xbox prefers to leave us with physical copies as well.
For now, affected Xbox users will have to wait until they are able to log in again. At least, it doesn't seem to affect as many users as the PSN outage, but any such outage would be incredibly frustrating – and raises a lot of questions about how viable the all-digital future will be.
- brand
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Microsoft
- Original release date
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November 10, 2020
- Original MSRP (USD)
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$499
- operating system
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Proprietary (Windows based)
- processor
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Custom AMD 8-core Zen 2 3.8 GHz
- resolve
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720p – 4K UHD
