Beauty

Xbox Live struggles as Xbox Series X/S consoles come online

By Eric Abent/

It's a big day for Microsoft, as the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S are both launching and essentially ushering in gaming's next generation. As new consoles are no doubt being delivered and unpacked, players were greeted by something of an unpleasant surprise this afternoon, with Xbox Live going down for a period of time.

Things seem to be back to normal for the most part, but for about two hours this afternoon, Xbox Live was inaccessible. The timing of this outage couldn't have been worse, because there were almost certainly a number of people attempting to get brand new consoles set up. For those who already managed to set up a new Xbox Series X or Xbox Series S today, Xbox Live going down meant that those users weren't able to download games.

This isn't just a big day for Microsoft because of the Xbox Series X/S launch either, as today is the day that Destiny 2 goes live on Xbox Game Pass. Destiny 2 is one of the largest – if not the largest – Xbox Game Pass releases we've ever seen, and unfortunately, that game is still down at the time of this writing.

A look at the Xbox Live status page shows us that Destiny 2 is only thing that's down at the moment, with the Destiny 2 Twitter account indicating that this is part of scheduled maintenance. That maintenance has been extended four hours beyond what was expected when it started, and now maintenance is scheduled to complete at 4 PM PDT – three hours from the time of this writing.

So, it seems that the Xbox Live is kicking off the next generation with something of a rocky start. If you were having problems earlier in the day, try to connect again – and keep your fingers that this is the last of the problems Xbox Live has for the day.

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