Xbox Wireless Controller unresponsiveness getting a fix soon

It seems that Microsoft is having some technical difficulties with the latest iteration of its Xbox Wireless Controllers that launched alongside the Xbox Series X|S consoles. Earlier this year, the number of gamers complaining about the controllers randomly losing their connections has risen high enough for the company to take notice. This time, it's randomly unresponsive buttons that are creating a clamor among Xbox gamers. The good news is that Microsoft has promised a fix. The bad news is that no one except Microsoft knows when it's coming.

The exact cause or reason for this problem remains unknown. It may or may not be related to earlier reports that the controller would lose its connection in the middle of the game. Some users did report that the controller would become unresponsive but that seems to have gone under the radar until now again.

According to the growing number of complaints, the Xbox Wireless Controller would sometimes fail to register a particular button, or sometimes the entire controller would seemingly die completely. The latter would even force a restart of the Xbox to just get things working again. Rather than being confined to just consoles, however, the problem has also been reported even with PCs, cementing the suspicion that the problem is with the controller itself.

Microsoft told PC Gamer that it is aware of the situation and is working on a fix. It didn't give even a rough timeline for that but advised customers to visit Xbox Support for help. That, however, leaves the question open whether it's a simple software problem that can be fixed with an update or if it would require replacing it with a hopefully fixed unit.

While the ongoing problems with the new Xbox Wireless Controllers don't exactly make the new Xbox consoles unusable, they don't exactly inspire confidence in Microsoft's new design and hardware for the controllers. Of course, given the more sophisticated Xbox Wireless Controller, there were bound to be some problems though one would have hoped those got caught in QA before heading out to consumers.