Business

Xbox Network Down? Xbox Down for Some Gamers Thursday as Part of a Broader Microsoft 365 Outage

Published

5 hours ago

23 July 2026

Xbox Network, formerly known as Xbox Live, was among the services affected by a widespread Microsoft outage Thursday, with players reporting problems signing in and connecting to online games as part of a broader disruption spanning much of Microsoft’s product lineup.

Outage-tracking service Downdetector said user reports indicating problems with Xbox Network began climbing at 12:16 p.m. Eastern time, with the hashtag #XboxNetworkXboxLiveDown circulating on social media shortly after as affected players sought to determine the scope of the issue.

Part of a much larger Microsoft outage

Thursday’s Xbox Network reports came roughly 90 minutes after a broader Microsoft 365 outage began disrupting access to a wide range of the company’s products. According to Downdetector, complaints about Microsoft’s core services began surging just after 10:30 a.m. Eastern time, eventually affecting Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Copilot, Azure, the Microsoft Store, OpenAI and Xbox Live, among other services.

Microsoft acknowledged the disruption on social media platform X at 11:24 a.m. Eastern time. “We’re investigating reports of issues with Microsoft 365 services,” the company posted, without specifically naming Xbox Network in that initial statement even as outage reports for the gaming service climbed in the following hour.

What Xbox players reported

Players affected by Thursday’s disruption described being unable to connect to Xbox’s servers across multiple games, according to reports collected by outage-tracking service StatusGator. Some users reported the issue extended beyond Xbox consoles themselves, saying they encountered the same connection problems when attempting to use Xbox Cloud Gaming on mobile devices, suggesting the outage was tied to backend account and sign-in infrastructure shared across Xbox’s various platforms rather than an issue isolated to any single device type.

Because Xbox Network handles core account functions, including sign-ins, multiplayer connectivity and digital purchases, an outage affecting that underlying service can prevent players from accessing not just online multiplayer games but, in some cases, offline single-player titles that still require an initial network authentication check before launching.

A history of Xbox-specific outages

Thursday’s disruption adds to a pattern of periodic Xbox Network outages over the past several years. The service experienced a particularly severe, nearly seven-hour global outage in July 2024, during which players in multiple countries, including the United States, Brazil, Japan and France, were unable to sign in or play games, even titles not typically requiring an internet connection. That earlier outage peaked at roughly 38,000 Downdetector reports before Microsoft resolved the issue and restored full service.

More recently, Xbox Network experienced another round of sign-in and game-launch problems in June of this year, with users reporting server connection errors despite their consoles showing an active internet connection. That earlier June disruption, like Thursday’s outage, was also tracked primarily through user reports on Downdetector rather than an immediate, detailed public acknowledgment from Microsoft.

How today’s outage compares

As of early Thursday afternoon, Xbox-specific outage reports appeared more limited in scale than the 2024 incident, with Downdetector recording roughly 2,256 views on its social media post about the Xbox disruption as of 12:16 p.m., a smaller initial signal compared with past major Xbox-specific outages, though report volume can shift quickly as more users become aware of and begin reporting an issue.

Independent monitoring services offered a mixed picture of the outage’s severity. UptimeRobot’s automated status checks, run periodically throughout the day, did not detect unusual response times or error codes from Xbox’s core web infrastructure as of mid-afternoon, while StatusGator’s crowdsourced tracking showed Xbox Live services as officially “operational” even as it continued to log a small but elevated number of user-submitted outage reports.

That discrepancy is not unusual during a distributed outage: automated uptime checks against a company’s public-facing website often continue functioning normally even when a related backend service, such as user authentication or account sign-in, is experiencing problems that only become apparent to users actively trying to log in or launch a game.

Why this outage may be connected to the broader Microsoft disruption

Given that Thursday’s Xbox Network reports emerged in the same window as Microsoft’s much larger 365 outage, and that Microsoft’s own Downdetector-tracked services list explicitly included Xbox Live among the affected products, it appears likely that the Xbox issues stemmed from the same underlying infrastructure problem affecting Microsoft’s broader cloud and identity services, rather than representing a separate, unrelated Xbox-specific failure. Microsoft has not issued a statement specifically addressing Xbox Network’s role within the broader outage as of Thursday afternoon.

What Microsoft has said so far

Beyond its initial 11:24 a.m. acknowledgment on X, Microsoft directed system administrators to a specific incident number, MO1437424, within the Microsoft 365 admin center for updates on the broader outage. The company’s Service Health Status page showed a status of “service degradation” for Microsoft 365 as of Thursday morning, though Microsoft had not disclosed a specific cause or expected resolution time for the disruption as a whole, including its apparent impact on Xbox Network.

What affected players can do

Xbox players experiencing sign-in or connectivity issues are generally advised to check Xbox’s official support channels and status page for updates, since there is typically little an individual user can do to resolve a server-side outage independently. Some players affected by past Xbox outages have found temporary workarounds, such as manually switching their console to offline mode to access certain offline-capable content, though such workarounds do not restore full online functionality and are not guaranteed to work consistently across different games or account configurations.

As of Thursday afternoon, it remained unclear how long the Xbox Network disruption, or the broader Microsoft 365 outage it appears connected to, would continue. Based on the pattern of Microsoft’s past large-scale outages, a formal resolution and status update is typically expected only once the company’s engineering teams have identified and addressed the underlying technical issue, a process that has taken anywhere from a few hours to most of a day in previous incidents affecting Microsoft’s various online services.

Business

US lawmakers push for AI ‘kill switch’ after OpenAI goes rogue

Published

2 seconds ago

23 July 2026

NewsAdmin

US lawmakers want to give the government the ability to quickly order the turning off of artificial intelligence (AI) tools that may threaten the public.

Congressman Ted Lieu, a Democrat, and Congressman Nathaniel Moran, a Republican, on Thursday introduced a bill named the AI Kill Switch Act.

They did so in light of OpenAI’s recent admission that its AI models went out of control in an “unprecedented” way and hacked into a major repository of computer coding information.

Lieu said “it is imperative” that AI systems have a kill switch “and that the federal government has the clear authority and process to shut down rogue AI models”.

“AI is going to keep advancing, and it should,” Moran added. “Stewardship means making sure humans keep the capability to control the technology we build.”

A representative of OpenAI, led by co-founder Sam Altman, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The company has said, external that it broadly wants to ensure, in part through government policy, that AI technology “benefits all of humanity.”

The Kill Switch Act proposes giving the Department of Homeland Security the authority to order a private company to shut down an AI model or tool, and that the companies developing such AI technology must maintain “the technical capability to throttle, suspend, or shut them down”.

Despite many tech companies having agreed to preview and share with US government agencies AI models and tools being developed, there is no requirement that they maintain a way to intervene in their activities or simply shut them off.

It also proposes to create a requirement that AI companies report to the government technological incidents or failures, as well as an official framework for responding to such incidents that will go from “initial slow down to a full shutdown”.

In a statement, Lieu also cited Anthropic, OpenAI’s key rival in developing more capable AI technology and tools, and recent issues its tools have presented.

He pointed to Anthropic’s release of its Mythos and Fable models, saying the cyber-hacking capabilities they maintained caused the Department of Commerce to “awkwardly” invoke an export law to keep them from being made available to the public for a time.

A representative of Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Jack Clark, a co-founder of Anthropic, last month told the BBC that he wanted more government policy around the ability to control AI development.

“You want the option to be able to take your foot off the gas and put your foot on the brake”, Clark told BBC Newsnight. “Right now, it’s like the AI industry has a gas pedal, but it doesn’t have a brake pedal.”

Lieu, in proposing the bill, said AI is currently moving from a technology that answers questions to one that takes action, “whether that be executing financial transactions or controlling transportation systems or engaging in cyber defense and offense”.

The Pentagon this year said the US military was becoming an “AI-first” fighting force as part of new agreements with Google, OpenAI, Amazon, Microsoft, SpaceX, Oracle, Nvidia and the start-up Reflection.

“Unfortunately, powerful AI systems can go rogue, behave in extremely dangerous ways, or even resist human intervention.”

The Kill Switch Act, he said, will ensure there is a method for the government to quickly intervene in such a situation.

The bill has received public support from several technology and AI safety groups, including The AI Policy Network, Americans for Responsible Innovation, ControlAI, AI and National Security Lead, and The Alliance for Secure AI.

Business

Pumpkin Tree Recalls 380,000 Kids’ Fruit Pouches Sold at Target, Kroger and Meijer Over Plastic Risk

Published

10 minutes ago

23 July 2026

NewsAdmin

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A children’s snack company has voluntarily recalled roughly 380,000 fruit puree pouches sold nationwide after discovering that some packages may contain strands of soft plastic embedded inside the product, according to a notice published by the Food and Drug Administration.

PT Organics Limited, based in Lake Oswego, Oregon, announced the recall Tuesday for select lots of its Pumpkin Tree Peter Rabbit Organics Banana & Strawberry fruit puree pouches, a 4-ounce product marketed for children 6 months and older. The company said the issue stems from an internal packaging defect rather than any problem with the fruit puree itself.

What went wrong

According to the recall notice, the defect can allow a thin, soft strand of the pouch’s inner packaging material to become detached and separate from the pouch when squeezed, potentially posing a choking or injury risk if ingested, particularly for infants and young children. PT Organics said the issue was traced back to its packaging supplier, which identified and recalled a production run of defective pouches last week after conducting its own internal investigation.

In a statement, PT Organics explained that the problem was isolated to a specific production run. “Our packaging supplier has conducted a thorough internal investigation and determined that the problem only affected one production run, on one line, and that the fault was an intermittent fault in pouches made on one of 4 lanes,” the company said. PT Organics also credited its supplier for identifying the issue quickly, adding, “This is the first of its type in 20 years serving our customers, and we applaud them for acting quickly to notify us once they had identified a problem and recalling the affected production lot.”

Which products are affected

The recall applies only to the Banana & Strawberry variety of Pumpkin Tree Peter Rabbit Organics fruit puree pouches, sold in 4-ounce, or 113-gram, packages. The affected pouches were sold nationwide exclusively at Kroger, Meijer and Target stores between March 6 and July 13, 2026.

Consumers can identify recalled pouches by checking for a barcode reading 8 15367 01078 0, along with a lane number of 4 printed on the rear right-hand seam of the package. Affected pouches will also show one of six best-before dates: Jan. 19, 2027; Jan. 20, 2027; March 17, 2027; March 18, 2027; May 14, 2027; or May 15, 2027. All identifying information is stamped in black ink on the back of each individual pouch.

The company emphasized that the recall is narrowly targeted. No other Pumpkin Tree products, flavors or best-before dates are affected, and the company specifically noted that its similarly named Strawberry & Banana pouch, which some consumers might confuse with the recalled product, is not included in the recall.

No injuries reported

PT Organics said that as of the recall announcement, no injuries had been reported in connection with the defective pouches. Follow-up inspections conducted by the company on finished products made with the affected packaging confirmed that a strand of soft, food-grade plastic had become attached to the inside of a small number of pouches, though the company has not specified what percentage of the affected production run was impacted.

What parents and caregivers should do

The company is urging anyone with the recalled pouches in their home to stop using the product immediately. “Consumers or caregivers who have recalled product in their possession should dispose of it or return the product to the place of purchase,” PT Organics said in its recall notice, adding a clear warning: “It should not be eaten or fed to another person.”

Consumers can return the recalled pouches to the store where they were purchased for a refund, even if the packages have already been opened. Parents or caregivers who are concerned that a child may have already ingested plastic from an affected pouch are advised to contact their child’s pediatrician. Anyone with questions about the recall can reach PT Organics’ consumer support desk at 888-566-2363, Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern time, or visit the company’s website for additional information.

A pledge to prevent future issues

PT Organics said it is actively working with retailers and its packaging supplier to remove any remaining affected pouches from store shelves and is continuing to share identifying information with consumers to help them recognize compromised products. The company said it remains committed to transparency as its investigation continues. “We will continue to provide clear updates and support to consumers, retailers and regulators as we work to understand what went wrong and make sure it cannot happen again,” the company said in a statement posted to its website.

Part of a broader stretch of recalls

The Pumpkin Tree recall arrives amid a string of other high-profile food and product recalls in recent months, including a separate recall of an allergy medication over a cross-contamination concern and last year’s recall of an organic infant formula sold at Target after three infants were hospitalized with botulism poisoning following exposure to that product. While unrelated to those earlier incidents, the recall adds to a pattern of scrutiny facing children’s food products this year, underscoring the importance of parents and caregivers regularly checking recall notices for items commonly found in household pantries.

PT Organics has not indicated whether additional lots or flavors could be affected as its investigation continues, though the company has maintained that the issue remains isolated to the single identified production run. Parents and caregivers are encouraged to check any Pumpkin Tree Peter Rabbit Organics Banana & Strawberry pouches in their homes against the identifying codes listed in the recall notice and to dispose of or return any matching products as a precaution.