XBox Live is down again

After sporadic outages at the end of last week & the weekend, Microsoft brought in the new week with an eight hour outage.

At the time of writing the system is still down (and affecting services on this very sight no less), with their own service page showing the following areas are affected:

• Purchase and Content Usage

• TV, Music and Video

• Xbox Live Core Services

So basically everything you could possibly want to use you Xbox for.

The Cause

As yet this is unclear, whether it's a bunch of kids with a botnet or a screw up with engineering changes - no one has claimed responsibility as yet, and Microsoft are tight lipped as per usual other than tweets that 'people are on it'.

Our take

It's getting to the point XBox live outages are becoming so regular its not newsworthy. If Microsoft can't bring stability to the platform, then either lower the cost of the service, introduce credit for times the service was unavailable, or remove the restriction on third party apps needing to go through XBox live authentication. Apps like Netflix, YouTube, ABC.etc (or Sky/BBC/ITV if you're in the UK), are needlessly taken offline because the apps report who you are (and your membership status) via XBL's 'OAUTH' (an authentication system) to the app provider. When Microsoft goes down, they cant authenticate you - and the system goes offline. This is largely due to Microsoft's requirements to require Gold (paid) status to use these services. Remove that jump and let Netflix or any other app run like it does on a PS4, iPhone, Android or any other platform.