It's not just you: Xbox Live is currently experiencing issues

If you're having a little trouble with Xbox Live this evening, then you're not alone. According to the Xbox Live status page, it began experiencing problems a short time ago with a couple of different services.

The two main services affected are Purchase and Content Usage, as well as Social and Gaming. Both are listed as limited, with messages stating that the Xbox team is aware of the problem and working on fixing things up.

We'll keep an eye on the service page and update this post when things are in the clear. In the meantime, if you're having issues purchasing content from the Xbox store or interacting with your friends on your Xbox One or 360, sit tight and hopefully Microsoft will have this cleared up sooner rather than later.

Source: Xbox Live Status (opens in new tab)

Dan Thorp-Lancaster

Dan Thorp-Lancaster is the former Editor-in-Chief of Windows Central. He began working with Windows Central, Android Central, and iMore as a news writer in 2014 and is obsessed with tech of all sorts. You can follow Dan on Twitter @DthorpL and Instagram @heyitsdtl

73 Comments
  • Unbelievable. Xbox Live's stability has gone down the toilet since the One came out. Just flat out unacceptable from a service i happily paid for all these years.
  • I agree. I'm not sure what's going on but the promises of those 300k servers haven't amounted to much.
  • Yup. Hate to admit it as well but I feel like 40-50% of the time that I log in to play online with friends at least one of us is experiencing some kind of service issue preventing us from playing. Either friends can't connect to my party, or people are being booted in and out of parties, people can hear you speak but we can't hear them, can't access their friends list.. It's always the same things. Not sure what happened to Xbox Live since the 360 but I almost NEVER had service issues with my 360. My PS4 buddies love rubbing these problems in my face.
  • To be fair, ps4 has its share of online issues. However, the whole network tends to go down whereas on Xbox you can be online but nothing works. ​
  • Good to know it's not ONLY Xbox. My buddies that have both consoles seem to never admit their PS4 woes. Probably cause they favor their PS4's more and been trying to get me to buy another console lol.
  • It all depends some people still ha e acces while others don't, one day my buddy had service lives a half hr from me, I couldn't connect, but my wife could get online and I couldn't, it happens to random people
  • You're ps4 buddies never play online cause last week at least 4 out of 7 days ps4 was having technical difficulties.
  • I've played the last few weeks and not one issue, it must be u
  • Ever heard of Lizard Squad or DDoS attacks?
  • Yeah and if that was the only time Xbox Live went down then no one would be complaining. However, some part of Xbox Live (friends, parties, purchasing, social etc..) is down almost daily at this point. It's a mess.
  • Way to overreact... Lol, it's actually quite rare. And PS4 online services are a joke, everyone knows that.
  • Its not overreacting. I pay for a service. Said service goes down more than is reasonable. Therefore I am dissatisfied. You can be critical of something without overreacting, which I did. Maybe you should try not being such a fan boy, see how that works.
  • Guys, it went down for all Christmas day, then had a few problems fixed over the next two days, then there was no problems(for me or a majority of people) until today it won't display friends, you are overreacting
  • You don't know what you are talking about. For example, on the Xbox one subreddit (over 100,000 subscribers) many people have complained all year about the service. If you don't believe that, then go to Microsoft's own Xbox live status page and see how often its down. Its not an exaggeration to say Xbox Live experiences issues weekly, if not daily.
  • Here's the top post on r/xboxone right now, keep thinking there's no problems if you want but your crazy http://www.reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/2sz730/cant_open_friends_list_a...
  • Oh ya let me go all over the internet forums where all people do is cry. Try talking problems to the hundreds of thousands of been playing with online lol
  • All I'm trying to say is the service has been bad since Xbox one launched. Its very noticeable. Lots of gaming sites have written about it.
  • Well I'm saying you should at least appreciate how much Microsoft is working hard to fix it for everyone to have an enjoyable experience
  • I hope that's the case.
  • It's not a charity. What is there to appreciate? You pay for their services. They should always deliver. Posted via the Windows Central App for Android
  • I pay for their services, which they do an excellent job of providing me with. Ever heard of hackers? That's mainly the reason XBL has been experiencing issues this past month. But I'm still getting a far better experience than my friends who own Playstations so I'm very happy with what I paid for and also have other things to do then complain about Xbox Live.
  • A joke? How its exactly the same nothing is different,stability wise its the same, features wise nothings different, what are u taking about?
  • This. I can't remember X360 having this much problems. Now Live is having issues at least once a week! I have paid for membership many years and now I don't feel satisfied.
  • XBL service is trash now. I don't care what 14 year old hackers are doing. MS really dropping the balls lately on nearly everything.
  • You should channel your anger at the Lizard Squad dipsticks. DDOS are nearly impossible to thwart. Both the PSN and XBLive have been hit by these asshats. Be thankful XBLive has either been hit less or they've been able to handle it better than PSN. IGN seems to have articles on PSN being down 3x more than XBLive articles.
  • Here's the thing though. Live itself isn't going down all the time, just certain features. IGN isn't going to write an article about people not being able to access their friends list for the 5th day in a row etc... Xbox Live is usually up, but many of its features will be offline or unavailable (friends, parties, etc).
  • Not true. IGN has articles stating when PSN or XBLive is down or when some services are down. I read IGN almost daily and they report very diligently.
  • To prove my point, I just checked IGN. An article on XBLive friend list and cloud services being down was posted. Services being down does suck, and needs to improve. I would say the silver lining is that at least XBLive isn't as bad as PSN being COMPLETELY down compared to XBLive.
  • I don't see this at all, other than Christmas, it's been just as reliable as ever for me and everyone I know. And everytime WC post ms it's having issues I look up at my game and shrug.
  • This shit has cost me several iron banner matches in destiny.
  • Thats weird. I can play on destiny. Just no party or friends list.
  • Slightly on topic, is anyone else having problems with the Windows phone store?
  • Sometimes there is an autocompletebox for an app name but no results.
  • It's giving me an error everytime i open the app 805a811, it just started happening randomly so thought maybe it was with MS servers, since there was an xbox live issue as well but seems like it's just me.
  • Side note, Xbox fitness free work outs were pulled.
  • Source please.
  • Uhh the console. Log in and you will see there's no more free content.
  • They have more problems with Minecraft uploads than anything if you watch the service closely.
  • & this app hasnt been updating properly for the last few hrs.
  • Lol the WORST part of it all, is support always tells us they'll get back to us shortly....and then reword the same message. Lol. Hang in there guys. Its a relatively new console and im sure years from now (when its been out as long as the 360) these issues wont happen anywhere near as often. Although the first commenter does have a point. Its certainly irritating
  • I downloaded the Halo: Nightfall series from my Halo MCC. Wouldn't work, kept getting in an endless loop without ever letting me watch even though the console recognised I had it already installed. Went on the official xbox forums and the first response was "we appreciate blah blah, were working hard to fix it blah blah". Then.nothing for ages except more reports of the same thing from 'Upset and frustrated' gamers. Then another response telling people to "uninstall the Halo channel app, long press the on/off button and unplug console from the mains for 5 minutes" That's hardly a fix, and it didn't bloody work. I can understand the frustrations of people because I pay for a service which Xbox are really struggling to deliver consistently. I bet if my payments were as inconsistent as their service they would do something about collecting my money pretty damn quick.
  • Omg we broke the internet!!!!!
  • In my house we have Xbox One PS4 & Xbox 360 & the most consistent console at the minute is 360 The One can't even sign in again 360 is online with AW BOTH ON SAME HUB,360 On ethernet, I don't understand why Xbox One has so many issues Gaming
  • Ummmmmmm, what's Sam up to❓❓❓❓❓
    ......
    Daniel❓ Can we get an update soon?
  • I bet its because the Xbox one gets updates monthly as opposed to the 360 yearly updates. Oh and we all know windows 10 reveal is soon, so expect more Microsoft down time after that's announced.
  • I read earlier today that N Korea hacked Microsoft
  • This hacking things are popular nowdays, LOL
  • I haven't had one problem with Xbox live service since getting my one
  • That's odd. It definitely has been affecting the rest of us, particularly on Christmas day and within the last week.
  • Well Christmas is a day to be with family.
  • Some of us play games with our family! :-)
  • My PsVita is the #1 gaming console, maybe you guys should get one.
  • not even close to any console that connects to a tv/monitor
  • Ha! I have one and the only thing that has less apps and games than Windows Phone is the Vita. I'm going on a trip soon and contemplating bringing the PSP instead. The Vita still makes me sad. It is the best portable gaming hardware with the crapiest library known to man.
  • All of these complications are unacceptable. We are paying a fee for this service and it isn't fair that when I want to play and can't. Microsoft honestly owes us at least a week of Xbox Live for free to reimburse us. This is bullshit.
  • Microsoft should enable some apps like Netflix amazon or other stream video apps to work in the even of outages cause I don't have Xbox live but I do suffer cause i can't use Netflix or YouTube or amazon
  • I was in the middle of a single-player game of Halo 3 in the Master Chief Collection and all of a sudden the game stops and it says an update is required.  Totally nuts.  I've never had a required update pop up in the middle of a single-player campaign.  Then the update hung at 24% until I gave up.  Very annoying.
  • It was this way on 360 as well. Only option is to choose "go offline" in settings. Otherwise you are required to take the update.
  • No way.  My Xbox 360 never stopped in the middle of a game as I'm shooting some Flood to tell me the game has to be updated.  Xbox 360 (and I assume what's supposed to happen on Xbox One) checks for game updates when you launch the game.  Thinking about this now, my guess is that the game crashed and the Xbox One immediately tried to restart it, thus triggering the update.  I guess Xbox Live having problems froze the update the 24%.
  • Well I've been booted out of games on 360 (call of duty specifically) to install an update. It happens.
  • Interesting to hear.  I guess I've been lucky all these years?  It seems especially rediculous when playing a single-player campaign.  If that happened "as designed" rather than because the game crashed, then that would be a major design flaw to lose progress in a game because of a random update.
  • as a mobile first cloud first company im worried about such services which suffer outages
  • When I'm stuck with a day that's gray, and lonely, I just stick out my chin, and grin, and sing....
  • Anyone else having trouble signing in to Xbox Live on Windows Phone? I can't even see my achievements
  • I've been having inconsistent Live service since before Lizard Group. I'm sure what they did made things worse but I never had a quarter of Live service problems in the 8 yrs I owned my 360 as I have in the last 14 months I've own my Xbox One. And I can say for a fact my other friends have these issues. It's extremely frustrating because I'm paying for this service. And do you have any idea how difficult it is to round up 7 guys who are in their mid to late 30's, to all go online at the same time and for half of us not being to able to connect to live, or join the party (without getting constantly dropped) or without issues of sometimes I can hear them talk and sometimes I can't? Sure, if I had nothing better to do at my age but play Xbox 9 hrs a day I might not complain about the 5% of the time Live didn't work. But I do expect Live to work for the odd 2-3 hrs a week I find them the time to actually play.
  • I agree, but it seems to be more than just Live. Sometimes one or more of us has to reboot, and that usually solves the problem. I'm in the over 40 club, have maybe an hour, sometimes two to play a few nights of the week and on more than one occasion we've spent 45 minutes trying to get 3 guys to play the same game. We've been doing this since PGR on the original Xbox, lol. How often did the 360 need a reboot? Never (when it wasn't red ringing)!
  • Absolutely! I actually forgot to mention that after we've wasted a good 20 min trying to solve our party issues (leaving party, sending new invites, leaving party, now you try inviting me this time) we usually all do a reboot to see if that works. Which does fix it half of time. Can't even think how many times this machine had us in our router settings too fiddling with settings we've never heard of thinking one of us is the culprit. Only to later do a connection test and see services are down- again. I love my Xbox but it's a love/hate relationship lately lol.
  • I don't know why not being able to upload worlds to Minecraft is a red alert
  • I understand some people like to compare the online stability problem with other consoles but that's just irrelevant. I couldn't care less what problems ps4 users are experiencing. I'm on the Xbox live service and there hasn't been a week without it having some kind of issue and for a paid service that's just unacceptable.
  • I thought I was the only one who couldn't access XLive. *phew* hope its back up soon
  • interestingly, "Purchase and Content Usage" and "Social and Gaming" were experiencing issues on Friday/Saturday on the 360 as well. Not sure why it spreads to the one 4 days later when the issue was fixed on the 360 already.
  • They need to move to azure :)
  • I just tried to buy music.Is it still down? ​