"Welcome to the digital era."

Image credit: Eurogamer / Xbox

Xbox's online services are currently down, and it's curious timing, as its rival PlayStation Network had similar issues only last week.

Xbox's live status page currently shows the 'account & profile', 'store & subscriptions', 'games & gaming', and 'apps & mobile' services are all down with a 'major outage'. Other parts of the online infrastructure, such as multiplayer and cloud-based games, as well as some functionality like sharing screenshots and captures, are seemingly untouched by the outage.

In practical terms, this means users may, per the warning, struggle to do the following: sign in; view games in the store; play downloaded games, disc-based games, and backwards-compatible games; and launch the Xbox mobile app.

Image credit: Microsoft

As noted by VGC, the official Xbox support account on X has confirmed "some users are encountering errors when attempting to sign in, see your game library, or launch games". Engineers are now working on the case, but it's currently unknown if this will be a quick and easy fix or something that will last longer.

Eurogamer has tested this outage on our own console but not found an issue with starting up games ourselves. The warning is also present on the console homepage, however, and if you are one of those affected by the above, the extent of the issues - notable across both physical and disc-based games - would render the console largely unusable for its core purposes.

The online problems besieging both PlayStation and Xbox are happening just as the gaming communities reckon with the idea of an all-digital future on consoles, and the knock-on effect of 'owning' games via DRM. In the case of Microsoft, they've also arisen following sweeping layoffs across its gaming division. Needless to say, this ill-timed situation isn't what the powers that be need when trying to relaunch a damaged gaming brand.

Right now, it's been over three hours since Xbox's response, while reports first emerged on the Xbox subreddit long before that, at around 5am BST. There, Xbox fans have been lamenting both the speed of Xbox's response and the fact that even owned and physical media can be impacted by a service outage. "Pay $x a month and $$$ for games to not be able to play [sic] them is a blast," wrote user Specific-Yam550, while Reclining9694 added: "Can someone please explain why a SERVER outage means I can't play ANY of my games LOCALLY OFFLINE?"

That thought was echoed throughout the thread. AverageJoeObi said: "Yeah can't launch anything it's cooked welcome to the digital era," while a user with the name Rickysgarbageland, meanwhile, put it succinctly: "None of my digital games work. That no physical future looking pretty dark."

Eurogamer has contacted Xbox for comment and any further details on the outage.

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