UPDATE: Microsoft insists that Xbox Live won’t be down for long

Xbox Live has been down most of this morning. And gamers are not at all happy.

It doesn’t help, of course, that today’s the day that the second piece of DLC for Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, called Hearthfire, is out now. But despite no sign of a reprieve Microsoft tells MCV that everything’s going to be OK.

Nothing’s been flagged to us on the Xbox Live service, but we are reporting some minor issues to the service via Xbox.com,” a spokesperson stated. This does happen from time to time what with regular updates and fixes to the system and should not be anything to worry about.”

However, MCV readers are less than convinced by the explanation.

After Tweeting earlier that all will soon be OK, one reader contacted MCV with the following:

Cannot get online via console, app or Xbox.com Last night me and my friends received friends requests from loads of accounts with 0GS [zero GamerScore, suggesting a new/fake account]. Not just friends people we were playing against also relieved these requests.”

Of course, MCV cannot verify the truth of these claims and Microsoft is certainly not budging, but one thing we can say for certain is that the longer the blackout remains, the louder the calls of foul play will become.

UPDATE: The same reader has contacted MCV again to say that he has now managed to log in to Xbox Live, but is facing further problems.

"I have got into my account BUT it said I was last logged into another console.Cannot gain access to my account management. So cannot see if MS points have been spent or not…bank account is fine though.Error message on console when trying to access807B01F4"

UPDATE 2: There are now widepsread reports of users being able to log back into Xbox Live without any problem. Hopefully that is the end of the issue.

UPDATE 3: Other users are also reporting the807B01F4 when trying to access account settings: