Xbox suffers major outage days after PlayStation went down

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Xbox is down, right on the heels of a timely PlayStation outage which punctuated concerns about Sony's proposed all-digital future .

This Xbox outage has now lasted several hours, and seems to have gotten worse after reports first emerged late July 26.

At 7:54am ET, the official Xbox Support Twitter account wrote : "Just checking in on the game library, sign-in, and game launch issue. We know this has been going on a while and appreciate your patience while our teams keep working on it."

The Xbox Status support page affirms that "account and profile, store and subscriptions, games and gaming, and apps and mobile" functions are all experiencing a "major outage."

As of 9:43am ET, Xbox support says it has "identified the issue" for all four areas and has a resolution "pending." These outages were first reported around 11:10pm ET on July 26, according to Microsoft's tracking.

"You may not be able to sign-in to your Xbox profile, may be disconnected while signed in, or have other related problems," a support disclaimer reads. "Features that require sign-in like most games, apps and social activity won't be available."

This also extends to your ability to find specific games in the Xbox store, opening apps, and, yes, "you may have problems playing your digital games right now." As ever, any blow to physical games is bad for everyone , whether you actually buy discs or not.

Additionally, Microsoft confirms, "You may have problems playing disc-based games right now." Ah, the joys of modern connectivity.

Xbox is reportedly testing a feature to digitize physical game collections as PlayStation decides to phase out discs .