UPDATE: It seems all is back up and running again. The story has been updated with a full rundown of yesterday's Xbox Live outage.
Original story continues below...
After a huge crash two weeks ago, Xbox Live experienced another partial outage on Monday, March 15. The outage affected game streaming and purchases on Xbox Live, and seemed to happen at the same time Microsoft Teams went down.
Microsoft’s support account acknowledged the problems in a tweet (embedded below) and said that it was working on a resolution to the problem.
Our teams are aware that some users may experience difficulties with Game Streaming and Purchases at the moment. Know that our teams are working to get things resolved as we Tweet. We'll be sure to post updates here as they become available.March 15, 2021
For the better part of the day, users couldn't access Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Party Chat, while others had problems making purchases from the Xbox Marketplace.
That first bit is a bit disappointing considering Microsoft just added Fallout 4 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim to Xbox Game Pass late last week, while the inability to talk to friends over Xbox Live will make battle royale shooters like Fortnite, PUBG and Call of Duty: Warzone much harder to play.
According to Microsoft's Xbox Live status tracker the vast majority of the service is functioning normally now, but was lit up yellow during the outage.
Outages are putting a pause on fun and games
Xbox Live wasn't the only Microsoft service experiencing some issues on Monday - Microsoft Teams went down as did Office 365 and Azure.
Microsoft claimed that the outage was due to an issue concerning, "a recent change to an authentication system" and has said that a fix is already going into place but has taken longer than expected.
All those services should be functioning normally now, but we'll update the article again should any of them go offline.
- Need some help tracking down a system? Don't miss our guides on where to buy an Xbox Series X and where to buy PS5
