Xbox Live was turned off for the second time this week
Microsoft’s Xbox Live service was turned off for the second time this week. Problems first started popping up somewhere after 7pm ET on Friday, with Downward detector indicating sharp peaks in user-reported connection issues, and Microsoft later confirmed to Twitter that it is “having problems” with matchmaking, party chat, and group search. ”
On Sunday, Xbox Live experienced a similar outage that lasted more than two hours. That was a bit more serious, with users reporting issues signing in to Xbox One devices. This time, Microsoft’s Xbox Live status page does not seem to indicate any problems yet, although the company acknowledges that it is working on a solution.
We are aware that users are having problems with matchmaking, Party Chat and Search Groups. Our engineers are working to fix this now. We’ll keep you posted here if we have any updates!
– Xbox support (@XboxSupport) March 20, 2020
Unfortunately for Microsoft, this is a rather inconvenient time to drop out of its multiplayer game service again. There are currently millions of people in the U.S. who are moving away and are being asked by local governments to stay away from public areas as bars, restaurants and other major social institutions stop working in response to the coronavirus crisis. That means quite a few people play video games and keep in touch with friends online, or at least in the case of Xbox users, who try this.