UPDATE: As of 1:40pm on April 5, all Xbox Live services have been restored. Original story follows.

On April 5, some Xbox Live services, including important social and gaming services, went down. According to the Xbox Live support page, affected services include in-game matchmaking, cloud storage, finding friends, Game DVR, leaderboards, avatar editing, and pictures. Prominent issues with the Xbox Live service outage include the inability to look at one's friend list, inability to view achievements, inability to receive notifications, inability to send or accept party invites, and inability to play with friends.

In our own testing, in-game matchmaking appears to be working, even though we can't play with friends. However, it's worth pointing out that Xbox Live service outages don't necessarily impact all Xbox Live subscribers, and so some may not experience any issues when gaming today. The outage also appears to only be impacting Xbox One and those using Xbox Live on PC, with Xbox 360 users not running into any problems. Again, mileage may vary when it comes to how well Xbox Live is working depending on region and other factors.

Meanwhile, the Xbox Support team is aware of the issues and is working on a solution. Typically, the Xbox Support team works pretty fast and is able to resolve Xbox Live issues within a few hours at most. Hopefully that will also be the case with this outage and full Xbox Live services will be restored sooner rather than later.

Xbox Live has gone down multiple times this past year. From January to February, Xbox Live services were down at least three times, with one incident being called the Black Screen of Death. The Black Screen of Death wasn't quite as dangerous as its sinister name made it sound, and like many other issues with Xbox Live, it was resolved within a few hours.

While Xbox is quick to fix problems with Xbox Live, the frequency at which Xbox Live has been down or has had some of its major services impacted in 2019 may be understandably frustrating to some subscribers. Hopefully the rest of the year is smooth-sailing for the service.

We will update this article once all Xbox Live services have been restored.