Xbox Live is having problems staying up today. I don't have my Series X yet (it's scheduled for delivery) but I was unable to log into my Xbox One X to watch video earlier.

Both Microsoft and Sony are pushing digital only versions of these boxes, and now people are going to have problems getting any games on them. Apparently people who already have games are also unable to play them because they can't authenticate. It's a mess that will hopefully be ironed out...but it shouldn't happen. The pre-order mess was one thing, but Microsoft is a leader in web services, which represents about a third of their revenue. We think of Microsoft as the Windows/Office/Xbox company, but the reason it is still one of the Big Five is that it actually does a ton of web-hosting and server software stuff, which is where basically all the company's growth has been recently.

Now maybe this was a massive DDOS attack, though they should be prepared for that too, and in the end I'm sure they'll sort it out relatively quickly, but it's still very strange that this keeps happening.

If you want to sell consoles that require Internet connections and can only get games via download then your Internet services just have to work basically all the time and at the very least on launch day. For people who can't get into Xbox Live right now the Series S is a $300 paperweight, and even some people with an X can't do anything on theirs even if they do own physical games for it.

I didn't even purchase a new xbox and I have been having issues just signing into my account. Feel bad for all of the people who got a new one today.

I’m not sure how well this applies to Microsoft (if it does at all with their infrastructure) but I’ve played a fair amount of server based games over the past 20 years and the issue there is often that they just aren’t willing to spin up a bunch of servers at launch only to scale back shortly after when user numbers decline. I suppose it depends on the agility of Xbox Live’s back end.

Nobody launches well. Who wants that spend for the one period of time your traffic will be peaked?

@shindig: I would be sympathetic to this if it weren't Microsoft, which, as I mentioned, is an industry leader in providing server capacity, and touts the flexibility of its Azure architecture.

This is like if Ford started a construction company but at the start of the first day it couldn't work at full capacity because they didn't have enough trucks. The web-services arm of Microsoft dwarfs the gaming arm at this point.

And again, they're selling all digital boxes that are useless when the servers aren't up. It seems like it would be worth it to spend whatever it costs to repurpose some of the server capacity they already have to make this go smoothly just to make people comfortable with that.

Anyway Xbox Live is back up so it wasn't down very long. That, at least, is good.

They probably fixed it by spinning up more Azure servers.

Eh, much ado about nothing. Its Tuesday. Go to work or school and play videogames later. We've all got bigger things to worry about.

@cornfed40: First of all it's 2020. A lot of people aren't going anywhere to do work and school stuff.

And it's also 2020 so if all we talked about was the most important stuff then we would never talk about video games at all, and this forum would just be constant horrible fighting.

This is a video games forum for talking about video games stuff. Everything on this forum outside off topic is just a distraction from the most important things going on, which we all need right now.

@bigsocrates: I completely agree with all that. I may have come off as flippant a bit more than I intended.

I was really more meaning, this was the first and only post on this topic, and ive been following the outage since I heard about it around noon. To me at least, that just means that it really isn't THAT much of a big deal to most people. If it was having a terrible effect, I would except GB of all places to be the place to read peoples thoughts on it.

I don't know crap about online infrastructure or anything like that, but my uneducated guess is that its pretty hard. From what im seeing, the issue was pretty much fixed all around about an hour ago. I just don't know how damning the whole thing really was, or how badly we can make it reflect on Microsoft

Hmm. I've been downloading and playing games on my X all day without issue. Maybe this is a regional thing?

@cornfed40: Well these forums are kind of dead these days so a lot of stuff doesn't get posted. There wasn't even a post when Steve got added to Minecraft until I made one.

Do I think it's a huge deal? Nah.

Do I think it means that Microsoft is a terrible company and Phil Spencer should be sealed into a Master Chief outfit and fired into space? No.

But there are people who took days off from work to play with their new consoles, or people who invested a lot of their disposable income into them, and they should be able to play them.

Really this is as much about how stuff like this makes me uncomfortable with our all digital future than about this particular outage.

We'd like to think that something like the 2011 PSN outage couldn't happen today, and it probably couldn't, but it would be a much bigger problem today than it was then. The Xbox Series S is literally useless without access to Xbox Live. It's a little scary that it went down today, even though Microsoft is one of the best positioned companies in the world to handle something like a console launch.