Microsoft online video game community Xbox Live has resumed operations after it was down for several hours 2 days ago. Xbox Live was shut down at around noon Eastern Time, thus putting many owners of both Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S consoles out of their ability to play online multiplayer games, access applications, and other services.

The outage is one of the longest for Xbox Live in recent years and, understandably, many Xbox gamers got annoyed they could not connect to friends or play games. Xbox Support has a status page for the problems and they state that the issue started from a smaller group of users, but later extended to a full-blown service outage.

Microsoft was quick to respond to the problem on and tweeted, “We’re aware of reports of Xbox Live being down. Our team is working hard to get everything back up and running. Thank you for your patience. “

Finally, after almost 3 hours and 45 minutes of non-stop efforts by the technicians to isolate and rectify the issues, Xbox Support conveyed through a tweet that Xbox Live functionality was back to normal across all platforms. The company also said that those users who were still unable to access the services should try to power off their console and then turn it back on.

As to what exactly caused the failure, it remains unknown, however, given that the outage took place when temperatures soared to their highest in many places in the United States it can be inferred that overheated hardware may have been the issue.

In any case, Xbox users are doubtless happy to get it back just in time for their night playtime. Microsoft engineers are probably on the case as we speak, trying to make sure that there is less downtime in the future and that another long outage will not happen any time soon.