12-hour Xbox outage leaves console owners unable to launch or buy games
James Batchelor
Editor-in-Chief
Monday 9th May 2022
Microsoft
Xbox
Xbox owners were left unable to play or purchase titles on Microsoft's consoles over the weekend, due to a major outage of the platform holder's online systems.
The issues were first acknowledged by the Xbox Support Team's Twitter account on Friday morning, specifically starting with issues around Konami's eFootball 2022.
By the end of the day, it had become clear that some users were unable to launch games installed on their Xbox consoles or play cloud gaming titles, and later it emerged that buying games was also subject to errors.
VGC reports the outage lasted at least 12 hours, while Xbox Support was still responding to reports of some issues on Sunday.
Xbox Support has since confirmed via Twitter that users should be able to launch games and access cloud gaming.
A post on the Microsoft Answers website lists potential errors that may still be encountered, and workarounds for them. For example, anyone having trouble playing or installing games from discs on Xbox Series X are advised to use the Xbox App to redownload the game to their console.
As VGC observes, the outage attracted a lot of criticism specifically around the use of DRM, with affected users blaming the use of online verification for preventing them from playing games they have purchased and fully installed to their console.
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