Xbox Live Suffers Worldwide Outage

Microsoft’s Xbox Live service went down for more than five hours yesterday, preventing users from signing in to the service. The Xbox Live problems started during the early afternoon local time. Microsoft was at hand to confirm and Microsoft it was investigating the outage.

As a user, if you were not already signed in to your Xbox account, then the the sign-in process would fail with an error, preventing access to certain services like Party Chat. Some apps may also fail to launch without the core Xbox Live services being online forcing games to launch incorrectly.

Microsoft marked the Xbox Live issues as a “major outage” over at the company’s Xbox status page. At that status page, Microsoft admitted that the fix is taking longer than anticipated.

Sony, the brains behind Playstation, were not spared earlier in the month. The Playstation Network also went offline for a record number of hours, before it was brought back to full operation, the issue being cited as a server problem. Microsoft has not released any extra details as to what may have caused the Xbox Live outage.