Xbox Cloud Gaming Outage: Here's Why Your Queue Is So Long

Xbox Cloud Gaming service has been down since Thursday, according to the official Xbox Support Twitter account. It appears that the service, which lets you play Xbox games on phones, tablets and other devices, is slowly coming back. But it’s not at 100% yet. 

The Xbox Support account tweeted on Thursday that it was aware of issues with launching Cloud Gaming titles. On the Xbox Status page, it showed the issue started at 1:42 p.m. ET/ 10:42 a.m. PT and it is still being worked on with a resolution saying it’s “pending.” The Xbox Support account tweeted Friday morning saying that people trying to launch a game will see long queue times, but it shouldn’t take as long as shown. 

“Users may see an incorrectly high wait time when attempting to launch a cloud gaming title,” the account said. “Our teams expect that users will be able to connect faster than the elevated time shown.”

When launching a game — for example, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 — the queue page does show up. In one case, it showed a wait time of more than 3 hours. On typical days, there’s hardly any queue. When there is one, it’s usually a few minutes. 

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A thread on r/xcloud, the subreddit for Xbox Cloud Gaming, showed that people were unable to play games on the service whether it was on their Android, iOS, Windows, Mac and other devices. The problem also appears to be global, with people in Germany, Costa Rica and Brazil saying they were unable to use the service.  

Xbox Cloud Gaming is included with an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate membership. It’s unclear if maybe the influx of new Xbox owners from Christmas could have caused an issue. A decade ago, both Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network went down on Christmas, but that was attributed to a cyberattack from a hacker group.