Microsoft's Xbox Live is back online once again after some downtime [Update]

Update: 12:50 am ET July 19 - The Microsoft Xbox Support X account now says the Xbox Live service is back online. The downtime lasted over four hours this time.

Original story - Owners of Xbox consoles are once again experiencing a lengthy amount of downtime this month on Xbox Live. The Xbox Status support page shows that many users were unable to sign into their Xbox Live account, while others could not access the digital Xbox Store to purchase games.

The outages were first reported just before 7 pm Eastern time, according to the page. As of this writing, they have not been fixed yet. In the latest report, filed nearly an hour ago, on the Xbox Support X account, Microsoft stated:

We are seeing improvement to sign-in, but impact to matchmaking and completing purchases continues. We appreciate your patience while we investigate. Continue to follow along here and on our status page.

As we mentioned, this is the second time in July that Xbox owners have had to deal with long Xbox Live outages. On July 2, just after 2 pm Eastern time, Microsoft confirmed that it was having issues wit Xbox Live. The outages lasted for several hours before finally being resolved in the early evening hours. Microsoft offer no explanation for why the downtime took place, nor why it lasted as long as it did.

This new Xbox Live outage comes just after Microsoft revealed it was raising prices on two of its Xbox Game Pass monthly plans, boosting the annual price of Xbox Game Pass Core, and keeping new subscribers from signing into Xbox Game Pass Console. It plans to launch a new Standard plan that would still have hundreds of games to play a month, plus online multiplayer, but with no new Day One games like the upcoming Call of Duty Black Ops 6 and more.

We will update this article when and if we get more information from Microsoft about this Xbox Live outage or if the problem is finally resolved.