Why did Xbox Live go down and what does it mean for gamers?

Xbox Live is officially back online after a substantial service outage that saw the functionality of everything from the Microsoft Store to online play drop for over three hours. If you unsuccessfully tried to game on your Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, or Xbox One (not to mention Xbox Cloud Gaming or PC Game Pass) during that time, then you might very well be wondering what went wrong and what this event could mean for the future.

First of all, it's important to establish why this outage occurred. For context, thousands of businesses around the world are currently experiencing severe IT issues - not just those in the gaming space. This includes major US airlines like Delta and United, who have been cancelling flights in response, in addition to the likes of Sky News and even the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK.

The root cause appears to be a busted update that was issued by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. You might not have heard of them, but they're a major player in the cybersecurity industry and provide software and systems that power many of the world's biggest businesses - including Microsoft.

According to a statement issued by the company, many customers are reporting multiple blue screen of death (BSOD) error screens. This is possibly causing a recovery boot loop, a well-documented situation where a glitchy computer can get stuck on a recovery screen and become unable to start up. It's like getting the dreaded red ring of death on your old Xbox 360, though instead of a console in your living room it's affecting some of the most important computers in the world.

Now, it's not currently clear whether this is the issue that directly caused Xbox Live to go offline. Given the timing and the fact that it is affecting many other online services, it does seem safe to assume that it is related in some way.

Analysis: What does it mean?

At its most basic level, the outage will undoubtedly lead to some pretty annoyed customers. No one likes being left unable to access their games, especially not for hours at a time. If you just got off work at the start of the outage and were eager to jump into a multiplayer game, I can't imagine that you're going to be very happy about it. 

This all comes at an especially inopportune occasion, as the highly-anticipated EA Sports College Football 25 was released earlier today. According to early sales data it looks like a massive hit on the platform and, with thousands of players diving into its online matches, these technical issues have almost certainly disappointed many. 

As the outage also broke the ability to purchase digital games in many regions, it seems all but certain that some sales were lost over those few hours. There's no saying how big of a difference this will make until we get our hands on some concrete data, but this downtime could have been disastrous for any struggling indie titles.

There are also some consequences that are much more difficult to quantify. Will this impact perceptions of Microsoft's gaming offering? The Xbox brand has come under increased scrutiny in the last few months, thanks in no small part to lacklustre hardware sales and the inexplicable closure of multiple first-party game studios including Tango Gameworks and Arkane Austin. A general sentiment that Xbox online services are becoming unreliable is this last thing that Microsoft needs.

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