The Xbox Live outage is becoming a sad situation.

We’ve already reported that the Xbox Live server outage has made not only games launched from the cloud unavailable but also games purchased digitally (and run locally!), which isn’t exactly fair to customers and raises the issue of the severity of online DRM. After the twelve-hour outage, things started to improve slowly. Still, Xbox Support wrote on Twitter yesterday afternoon, “We’ve seen significant improvement to the issue that has prevented some users from purchasing and launching games. We expect full mitigation in the coming days with the rollout of a new update.”

We’ve seen significant improvement to the issue that has prevented some users from purchasing and launching games. We expect full mitigation in the coming days with the roll out of a new update.

— Xbox Support (@XboxSupport) May 9, 2022

So the question of online DRM is a valid one, and Microsoft should not be surprised if some people turn to Sony, which may not apply the same rigour to PlayStation games. Moreover, this situation does not reflect well on the Xbox Everywhere cloud initiative recently announced by the Redmond-based company: if essential online services don’t work perfectly, how should we trust their cloud solutions…?

Juergen Stark, CEO of Turtle Beach (which manufactures headsets for consoles), said in his quarterly earnings report: “We expect that the supply constraints will abate significantly by the time we get into the holiday. Not that we don’t expect shipping times to go down a lot or anything like that. A decrease is expected. Improvement and performance on the supply on Xbox and PlayStation are mainly driven by the fact that we’ve all been in this environment for well over a year.

So, our lead times for ordering semiconductors are crazy high, but they’re no longer impeding our supply because we’re used to it. And we put the orders in well in advance. And we expect that Microsoft and Sony will be doing the same thing. And as, as that takes effect, the supply constraint should ease. We can’t predict it for sure, obviously, but that’s what we’re assuming in the numbers, and I think that’s a reasonable assumption.”

Source: WCCFTech,