Microsoft’s always-online Xbox One console is now only working offline for many people, as it fails to download the latest update.
After nearly 20 years, the Xbox 360 is losing its online marketplace this week. It’ll still work though, since it never needed an online connection to function, but the same is not true of early models of its successor, the Xbox One.
Famously, the original model of Xbox One was designed to be always-online, until Microsoft realised how unpopular the concept was, but it seems that the original design has an additional flaw: it’s not updating properly with new updates and is now effectively offline-only.
The Xbox One S and Xbox One X are unaffected, but the original, larger model no longer updates properly, with the problem appearing to revolve around how long it is since the last update.
If you’ve had your Xbox One in the cupboard for a while, not getting updates, then trying to add the latest one is where the problems start. And because that’s a fairly common scenario it’s happening to a lot of people.
Although Microsoft has been at the forefront of the modern push for backwards compatibility this highlights the problem of game preservation when it comes to online-only games and consoles.
Whereas you could have kept a SNES or Mega Drive in the loft for decades, and still have them work when you get them back down, that’s not the case with modern consoles, with the Wii U – which certainly wasn’t online-only – suffering similar update problems to the Xbox One.
Website Digital Foundry has confirmed the problem with Xbox One consoles, with firmware from 2017 and 2018 – which they’ve found impossible to update either online or using a USB stick.
A factory reset won’t work either and, in fact, that risks bricking the console because part of the process involves downloading the latest firmware, which the console can’t do.
Offline single-player games will still work on the consoles but not online or multiplayer ones, although Microsoft is expected to provide a patch that will resolve the situation.
The issue highlights a future problem, in that most modern consoles now expect to connect to online servers in order to function and yet if those servers are turned off, in a decade or so when the console is obsolete, they may no longer work.
The more dependent consoles are on online services the more difficult they become to maintain over a long period. The best advice for all consoles is to turn them on and update them at least every six months. If you don’t, you may find that, one day, they don’t turn on at all.
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