What just happened? At around 10 am Pacific this morning, Xbox One users found themselves staring at a black screen after powering up their consoles. Many initially thought their boxes had given up the ghost and took to social media to complain.

Twitter and Reddit lit up with users claiming that despite several soft and hard resets, their XB1s just wouldn't start. One player claimed he almost got his to fire up by pressing the Xbox button and A. However, that ultimately led to a screen telling him he needed to update his software and that the update was "not available at this time."

By 10 am, Xbox Support had acknowledged that it was aware of the problem and was investigating the situation to determine the cause. Xbox Program Manager Brad Rossetti piped in about thirty minutes later saying they had discovered the problem.

Apparently, a "service change" caused the black screens. Rossetti said they were working on rolling back the change, but there was no definite time frame. As of now the problem persists, but it might be fixed by the time of this publication.

Outages like this are frustrating, but are not uncommon. Both Sony and Microsoft deal with service interruptions on a somewhat regular basis. However, most of the time they can restore service fast enough that most don't even realize there was a problem. For those that do notice there is always gnashing of teeth and threats to switch consoles.

The grass is always greener until you're on the other side.