Things have been a little rocky over on Xbox Live recently. Though things seem to have stabilized for now, over the last week or so Xbox One users have been reporting a wide range of issues, none of which sound very pleasant to deal with. According to tips sent in (and a whole lot of frustrated posts on social media and gaming forums), this instability has made it impossible to consistently play multiplayer games online, buy new content from the Xbox Live store, and even launch digital (single-player) games. Yes, that means that if you bought Halo 5 digitally, there's a chance that you wouldn't be able to launch it. It gets even worse: At least some users have been unable to play DVDs and Blu-rays on the system.
While setting the Xbox One to "offline mode" should remedy many of these errors, I've also seen reports from people that insist that the problems remain even after they do this. If I'm being totally honest here: It's a real mess. When we tried to test things out here, everything worked fine--but that doesn't mean that other people haven't been dealing with problems for the last week. It makes this all very hard to investigate.
The problems seem to have been caused by a series of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks orchestrated by a group called New World Hackers. In an interview with Newsweek, a representative of the group lays out their motives:
We attacked Xbox to protest. Major companies like this have massive servers but no real protection. We want Xbox to update the protection they have, which isn’t much. ... [The Xbox attacks] also prove we do have as much power as we say we do, going out to the doubters. [We could] honestly knock Xbox off the face of the Earth.
I'm not sure that the altruistic front half of that statement aligns with the braggadocios back half, nor with the attacks themselves, which haven't seemingly demonstrated any novel security failings on the part of Microsoft's servers,just the standard susceptibility to DDoSing. That said, the official Xbox Support Twitter account did just tweet vaguely about "charges going through incorrectly" on user accounts, so maybe there is something else going on, too.
Regardless of the causes of the recent instability, the Xbox Live Status page currently shows all green and another tweet from the Xbox Support account says that things should be back to normal. But given the way that things have been going so far this week, I'm not quite ready to give an all clear.