Xbox website, marketplace and cloud saved games experiencing outages

Xbox Live's cloud saved games, purchasing system and portions of the Xbox website are unavailable, according to status updates on the Xbox Live Service Status website.

After initially being down when the outage began, the Xbox Live Service Status page came back online and revealed two areas affected by the outages.

According to an update published at 7:07 p.m. ET, Xbox Live users may "experience difficulties" accessing "saved games and data in cloud storage." Our tests revealed error codes 807b01f7 and 807b0198, rendering those saves unplayable during the outage. An update published at 6:55 p.m. ET revealed that that users may also "experience difficulties" when "redeeming downloadable items with Microsoft Points, buying additional Microsoft Points, or viewing your points balance."

The outage comes in the wake of a Dec. 28 failure that lasted several hours and also affected Xbox Live Marketplace and cloud saves, though the error codes displayed then — 80154080 and 8015000A — are different than the current outage's. Microsoft compensated affected users with a free month of Xbox Live Gold service.

The Xbox Live Service Status page was down again at publication, though many tweets on the official Xbox Support on Twitter page indicate that Microsoft is aware of and working on the problems.

We're monitoring the situation and will update this article as new information becomes available.