Xbox games not playing for you? Here's what's going on

When it’s too hot to play outside, video games can be your best friend, keeping you entertained and scratching that competitive itch, right from the comfort of your couch. At least, that’s how things should be working, but this summer has already seen its fare share of gaming outages, like the service interruption that hit the PlayStation Network late last week. Now it’s Microsoft in the hot seat, as multiple Xbox systems go offline.

Microsoft’s Xbox status tracker confirms ongoing issues affecting sign-ins and viewing games in the store, but also more critically, problems playing both digital and disc-based games.

The company first says it became aware of the outage over 12 hours ago, but as of just a few minutes ago reports that it thinks it’s identified the underlying problem.

That said, there’s no fix available to restore normal operation — not just yet, anyway. But now that Microsoft has actually tracked down where the problem lies, hopefully we won’t be waiting another 12 hours to get our games back.

Developing…