Xbox Live Outage Blocks You From Playing Your Digital Games

Instead of playing Apex Legends right now, I’m writing this post to let you know that Xbox Live is down for many gamers around the globe. The issue is that digital games will not load but if you have the physical disc, you may still be able to play those titles.
The Xbox Live status report shows a bunch of different issues from buying/redeeming/downloading content is not working. The My Games app may not be working either along with some TV and video functionality.
When you try to launch a game, you may be greeted with the following error: 0x97e107df. This error stops the game from loading and shows the fun screen of “Something Happened”, as seen in the video below.
Xbox pls fix. pic.twitter.com/A6Ob410NTP
— Brad Sams (@bdsams) August 7, 2019
If you are lucky, you may still be able to play your digital titles. Some users are able to access their content without issue but it’s impacting enough users that there are dozens of threads on Reddit with thousands of users reporting the problem and Twitter is full of complaints as well.
Outages happen, with this current issue lasting over 3hrs at the time of this post, but what’s frustrating is that these outages are poorly communicated. When Xbox Live is down, like it is right now, is it too much to ask to put a notification on the dashboard?
Ideally, Microsoft would provide a constant Xbox Live status report on the dashboard of the Xbox One, but instead, when things don’t work, you need to fire up a browser on your phone or PC, and hope that the status page provides an answer or dig into the Settings on your console.
Issues aside, as we head toward a future of game streaming services, outages like these become more frustrating as not only can you not game, but you can’t even play offline for titles that you spent $60 or more to own.