A recent spate of Xbox outages has turned the console into a paperweight and they could persist for a few days longer until a patch drops.
Ever since last Friday, May 6, Xbox owners have been experiencing frequent outages in online services, outages that have caused more problems than just being able to play online.
Aside from being unable to purchase any new games, Xbox owners also couldn’t access their existing libraries of paid-for game. Physical games were thankfully unaffected, but no-one was able to play anything via cloud gaming or even ordinary digital games.
Despite the official Xbox Support Twitter account insisting the problem had been solved, many people have still been affected over the last three days.
Being unable to cloud stream games is one thing, but not getting to play digital games you already paid for naturally didn’t sit well with people. Especially as many single-player games, that don’t have any online features, were also affected.
Microsoft has yet to explain what the source of the problems are, only that, as far as they’re concerned, they’ve been fixed.
‘Users in Europe should no longer be encountering errors when attempting to launch games and start cloud gaming sessions. Thank you for all your reports, and sticking with us,’ reads the most recent Twitter post from Xbox Support.
The Xbox Support website also states that all services are currently up and running.
Unfortunately, many have responded with claims that the issues have not been fixed for them. Not just people located outside of Europe, like North America, but also within the UK and France.
Some have said they can’t access apps either, such as YouTube, effectively turning their console into a paperweight. Others, however, seem to be having no such issues or have found workarounds that have got their console working again.
I’m in NA, Central probably connected East.. this crap is still happening on and off.. I’m glad I got a nice mother’s day with my wife and kid.. but flip side we couldn’t enjoy family oriented games.. thankfully we have Nintendo Switch which doesn’t have this crap. Fix it XBOX!!
— ThorOdin87 (@PatHCAnderson) May 9, 2022
Not fixed.
(France). pic.twitter.com/rDpeAQiuym— 𝔾𝕣𝕖𝕘 ℂ𝕒𝕣𝕡𝕖𝕟𝕥𝕚𝕖𝕣 (@greg_carpentier) May 9, 2022
Hey everyone, I found a FIX.
I setup a hotspot connection on my mobile device and connected to that with my Xbox and then everything started to work. After about 10 mins I switched back to my original router connection and haven’t had an issue since. I hope this works for someone— Faded_Native 🍋🐺 (@Faded_Native) May 9, 2022
This entire situation highlights a concerning issue with Microsoft’s DRM policy. Whenever you launch a game it requires an internet connection to check for a licence, which will allow you to access the game.
Some are hopeful that this will force Microsoft to make some meaningful changes to its policy or at the very least make it less strict. It probably won’t though, not without a lot more fan outrage.
The Xbox outages have made it clear that something needs to change with their DRM policy, games that are downloaded to my console should have a window to be offline and playable without checking in
Hopefully we get some clarity and a solution to avoid this issue again
— Parris (@vicious696) May 7, 2022
UPDATE
Microsoft has since shared another update on the continued issues and simply said that it has seen ‘significant improvement.’
However, it sounds like a proper fix won’t arrive until later in the week, with Microsoft planning to release a new update.
What exactly this update will do is unknown and Microsoft has otherwise not addressed the specifics behind the problem, such as its cause, nor if it will make any changes to its DRM policy.
Weâve seen significant improvement to the issue that has prevented some users from purchasing and launching games. We expect full mitigation in the coming days with the roll out of a new update.
— Xbox Support (@XboxSupport) May 9, 2022
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