Xbox One users had a little bit of a nightmare last night (Wednesday January 30) when they attempted to boot up their consoles, only to be met with a black screen.
Two members of the UNILAD Gaming team told me that they could get as far as the startup screen before everything went south. Concern only grew after one of our team completely rebooted his console to discover that hadn’t fixed the issue.
Plenty of Xbox owners swiftly took to Twitter to express their frustration/amusement at the situation:
Some couldn’t get beyond the console startup screen, while others met their end while trying to sign into Xbox Live or boot up a game. The most fortunate users were able to load up certain games, but were unable to access online multiplayer.
Fortunately, Microsoft identified the issue a few hours after people started reporting problems, and has now resolved all of the ongoing troubles, which it seems can be attributed to the Xbox Live service having a bit of a wobble (rather than any kind of hardware issue).
Microsoft said on Twitter:
The issues surrounding Xbox One console startup, sign-in, title update errors, and our status page have now been resolved. Thank you for sticking with us while our teams addressed these issues and we appreciate the reports. As always, we’re here and we’re listening.
It’s still not entirely clear what exactly caused this widespread issue, but given it rendered the majority of Xbox One consoles completely useless, I’d imagine it was a pretty serious problem.
In other Microsoft news, Xbox will apparently have a big presence at E3 2019, so as to make the most of Sony’s absence. We can expect a “great” lineup of titles to be announced, and speculation is building that the company will finally show off the next generation of Xbox consoles.
If you have a story you want to tell send it to UNILAD via stories@unilad.co.uk
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.