Downloaded Xbox games wouldn’t start during Xbox Live outage

An outage on the Xbox Live network prevented players from playing cloud games and making Xbox Store purchases on Saturday. Also already downloaded single player games did not start in some cases.

In the case of digitally purchased games that had already been downloaded to consoles, there was nothing to prevent the games from running except a digital rights management check on Microsoft’s servers. Nevertheless, games in most cases wanted do not start. Setting the Xbox as ‘Home console’ could make it possible for the games to start despite the outage, but that worked not in front of everybody. The disc versions of games would still start.

In addition to digital copies of games, players are also unable to use Xbox Cloud Gaming and access streaming apps such as Disney+ and Netflix. The outage affected the Xbox 360, Xbox One and Xbox Series X and S. What exactly went wrong behind the scenes, Microsoft does not report.

The first complaints about the outage came in early Saturday morning and the Xbox customer service account tweeted early Sunday morning that the outage was final fixed had to be. It’s unclear whether the outage affected Xbox gamers worldwide.

The Xbox Series S only runs digitally purchased games because it doesn’t have an optical drive