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Xbox Live’s very bad weekend meant some couldn’t play games

Whelp.

Xbox Live just had a very bad weekend, with multiple outages that prevented some users from playing games they’d previously purchased.

Issues began on 7 May here in Australia, with instances popping up throughout the day and into Sunday, 8 May as well.

“We’re aware that some users are unable to purchase games, launch games or start Cloud Gaming sessions,” Xbox Support advised in a tweet back on Saturday. “Our teams are investigating. Please keep an eye here and on our status page for updates.”

Similar messages popped up throughout the weekend.

Microsoft advised that players with disc-based copies of games would be able to play titles without issue, and theoretically the Xbox’s offline mode would cover others. Players themselves countered those claims as some only own discless consoles including the Xbox Series S, or simply couldn’t use offline mode as expected.

“This outage has shined a bright light on the fact that a service issue can effectively brick our xboxes and render our digital library unusable,” one user wrote on Reddit. “Offline mode is supposed to be useful for times when we can’t connect to the internet. Our downloaded digital games are supposed to be accessible for play even without an internet connection.

“But now a service issue has made it impossible to play any games without an internet connection. Isn’t this the exact thing we rebeled against in the early years of the Xbox One that resulted in the guy making those decisions losing his job and the new guy promising that we could access our games regardless of internet status.”

I admittedly didn’t have any problems over the weekend, able to play digital copies of Dark Souls and Dark Souls Remastered (yes, I have a problem) on a non-home Xbox Series X while my hubby played my digital copy of Elden Ring under his account on my home-designated Xbox Series X. Some users on Reddit who hadn’t yet set their home console settings appeared to have better luck after toggling the setting.

We’ve asked Microsoft for comment on the downtime and surrounding issues.

Did you encounter any issues over the weekend? Sound off in the comments area, below.


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About the author

Steve Wright

Steve's the owner of this very site and an active games journalist nearing twenty (TWENTY!?!) years. He's a Canadian-Australian gay gaming geek, ice hockey player and fan. Husband to Matt and cat dad to Wally and Quinn.