UPDATE: All Xbox Live services have been restored.

The original story follows.

Some Xbox Live services appear to be down for Xbox One and Xbox 360 users, including party chat, access to friends list, logging in, and online gaming. The outage started on January 12, and has been reported by thousands of Xbox Live users.

While some have reported issues with online gaming, in our own testing, we only noted difficulties joining friends in parties, and that included receiving or sending party chat invites. We have been able to play games online, as well as access apps and digitally-downloaded games. As for accessing the friends list, we are able to see our friends list, but it appears to be frozen, showing data from yesterday instead of accurate, up-to-date information.

Microsoft is aware of the issues and working on a solution. However, it's unclear how long the current Xbox Live service outage will last, and what exactly is causing the problem. The weekend is when a lot of people actually have time to sit down and play video games, so here's hoping Microsoft is able to fix Xbox Live sooner rather than later.

While this particular Xbox Live service outage may be frustrating for Xbox One and Xbox 360 players, it doesn't seem to be as widespread or problematic as some past outages. As previously stated, we have been able to get into online games, and unlike others, haven't ran into any issues with party chat or things of that nature. Plus, this doesn't seem likely to be the result of a deliberate DDoS attack, like we saw during Christmas 2014.

Since the Christmas 2014 Lizard Squad attack, Xbox Live services have been relatively stable, with service outages only happening in a widespread manner a handful of times out of the year. In fact, the last time a major Xbox Live outage took place was last November, and that only lasted a few hours.

Again, it's hard to say exactly how long this latest Xbox Live service outage will last, but here's hoping it's resolved sooner rather than later.