Xbox Live outage locks players out of their games for hours

Since just before 5PM ET, an Xbox outage has caused gamers error messages when trying to launch their digital titles. Whenever a player tried to open a game, it quickly close and flash a message to sit tight as outages happen "once in a while".

Within the last few minutes (around 9PM ET) some people have reported being able to access their games after repeated tries, but as we move away from physical copies of games to DRM'd digital copies and subscription access like GamePass, an unspecified error that lasts for hours isn't making this seem like the best future of gaming.

Update (11:58PM ET): The Xbox Live status page still lists services as "limited," and while we've had some success logging on many others have not. The Xbox Support Twitter account posted a note saying "We've heard from our investigative teams that there has been improvement, however things are still being worked on," but did not give an estimate for when access will be fully restored.

Update (8/7 2:56AM ET): At about 2:29AM ET, the Xbox Support team tweeted "Our engineers have confirmed that purchased content should be accessible once again."