The past few days have been a roller coaster for Xbox fans, with services such as Xbox Game , Xbox Cloud Gaming, and game purchasing across console generations experiencing outages and interruptions. With the rise in digital gaming, both due to technological advancement and the COVID-19 pandemic, cloud gaming and subscription services like Xbox Game have become increasingly popular. Such online services are, consequently, vital parts of the Xbox team’s financial and communal relevance.
These outages began occurring shortly after gamers got their hands on some of the latest Xbox Game titles. The most recent Game announcements included Trek to Yomi and NHL 22, and along with Trek to Yomi, Citizen Sleeper and Loot River have already been made available for May. There are also rumors of FIFA 22 and Battlefield 2042 being two titles that will be available for Xbox Game subscribers. Said subscribers have been treated well in recent years, as subscription-based services have become extremely lucrative for both players and console developers like Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo. While Game used to be a place with few exciting titles to draw players in, it’s become a very valuable service for Xbox fans.
However, with new games being available every month on Xbox Game , network outages for even a couple of days become even more serious issues that players have little patience for. Since Friday, May 6, the Xbox network has experienced ongoing outages, leading to customers being “unable to purchase games, launch games or start Cloud Gaming sessions,” as stated by the Xbox Twitter (via Windows Central). Just two hours after Xbox reported the network issues, the Microsoft Store was up and running again, but it wouldn’t be until 3:11 AM on Saturday that Xbox would announce that the problem had been fixed. Unfortunately, the issues were back a short while later, and wouldn’t be dealt with again until early Sunday morning. As of the writing of this article, no further outages have been reported.
With the rise of cloud gaming, some types of outages could be disastrous, especially for games with limited saving options where being kicked from a session could mean losing hours of progress. Xbox in particular has managed to corner some of the market with its Xbox Cloud Gaming service, and rumors suggest that Xbox will stream games directly to TVs in the near future, essentially expanding Microsoft’s reach in the gaming industry.
Issues with the Xbox Network as a whole spell even more danger for both Xbox and consumers, with interruptions and outages also occurring simply while playing digital games or trying to purchase items from the Xbox and Microsoft stores. What’s particularly concerning is the fact that Xbox supposedly found a solution, only for the network to fail again shortly after. With that said, further issues could appear at any minute, so Xbox s may have to exercise more patience in such an event if these network outages continue.
Sources: Xbox /Twitter, Windows Central
