Microsoft Azure outage prevents users from playing Minecraft and Xbox Game Pass

Today, you may have tried to log in to Minecraft or play Xbox games, only to find you were unable to. This is a sign of a much larger problem that appears to have taken down a wide variety of Microsoft services. Everything from the Microsoft-owned Minecraft to everyday applications like Microsoft 365 appear to have been affected. This follows just over a week after a major outage at Amazon Web Services and other gaming sites such as Roblox and Fortnite. It also highlights a larger issue with game ownership. When your games rely on a steady internet connection and stable servers, it means that when something like this happens, you may as well not own those games.

Massive Microsoft outage impacts many services, including Minecraft and Xbox

At the time of writing, at least some services appear to be restored. Thanks to a social media post from Xbox Support, “users should once again be able to access the Xbox Store, manage their accounts… Xbox Support services are continuing to recover. We’ll provide updates here and on support.xbox.com as soon as they’re available.” But this wasn’t early enough for some players to begin to wonder, such as this Reddit post on the Minecraft subreddit, which asks: “Why does an OFFLINE game need an ONLINE launcher?” As the top comment on this post points out, the problem is authorization.

A post on the Minecraft Subreddit.Source: Reddit

A comment from Mlakuss on Reddit explains it succinctly, with well over five and a half thousand upvotes: “The issue here is the game having access to internet but not to auth servers.” The issue here was that, while Microsoft servers were down earlier today, they couldn’t verify that the user had a legitimate license to play Minecraft. While connected to the internet, Minecraft would continually try to obtain authorization but receive no response from Microsoft. Fortunately, it appears that at least some players were still able to play Minecraft offline by completely disconnecting from the internet. But users trying to use Xbox services may not have been so lucky.

A post on the Xbox subreddit.Source: Reddit

On the Xbox subreddit, users shared their experiences with Xbox Game Pass. One user commented: “…I haven’t turned my Xbox on in like a month and today I was thinking of downloading Ninja Gaiden 4 (gamepass) and it’s broken.” Another user replied to that comment, explaining how they were trying to download The Outer Worlds 2, which was supposed to be available to everyone today after its Advanced Access period.

The day-to-day convenience of digital games and services is rudely awakened whenever something like this happens. Today it’s Xbox, but it has happened to PlayStation in the past year as well. It’s on days like this that it would be nice to have a disc of Ninja Gaiden 4 or The Outer Worlds 2 and just be able to put it in the console and go. Sure, not every game can avoid this problem, but the more we, as consumers, lean into it, the more companies will, too. It gives away control for convenience. Thankfully, this didn’t happen on the weekend when many casual gamers would be sitting down to play, but this won’t be the last time something like this happens. It isn’t even the only time something like this has happened in the last month.

According to the BBC, the outage is believed to be caused by “an inadvertent configuration change.” So, it is possible this had nothing to do with the suspected DDoS attacks that may have been the culprit in large service outages in the last month that impacted gaming platforms like Steam.

Minecraft

November 18, 2011

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