Update: At approximately 9 p.m. ET, Microsoft announced that it was "no longer experiencing problems signing in to Xbox Live and services. The cause of the outage has not yet been disclosed.

Original Article

According to Microsoft, there is a "major outage" on Xbox Live that is preventing some users from logging in.

As noted by The Verge, the Xbox support account on Twitter first acknowledged that "some users are disconnected from Xbox Live" at around 3:00 PM EST. Just an hour later, the account tweeted again, stating that "our investigation is taking longer than expected" and advising users experiencing trouble to keep an eye on the Xbox Status page.

It is unclear the nature of the problem or whether it is the result of a DDoS attack or some other external influence. The status page indicates that all Xbox Live features and services are up and running, with the exception of "Accounts and Profiles," which is currently experiencing a major outage that is preventing users from logging into Xbox Live.

"You may be unable to sign in to your Xbox Profile, get disconnected while signing in, or experience other related issues.

"Features that require sign-in, such as most games, apps, and social activities, are unavailable.

When I tried to log in, sure enough, that's what happened: after entering my login information, I got a blank screen and was taken back to a page where I was not logged in. Oddly enough, I was able to report the problem even though I was not logged in.

According to the latest update on the status page, a "related issue" has been found and resolution is pending. We will monitor the situation and update as soon as the situation changes.