Microsoft’s Xbox Support has issued a statement saying it is “actively investigating” why some Xbox Series X users are not able to launch various Xbox 360 games on the system, after several months of players reporting issues to no avail.
We’re aware that some Xbox Series X players are unable to launch select backwards compatible Xbox 360 games and our team is actively investigating.
— Xbox Support (@XboxSupport) April 22, 2026
Players have been reporting problems launching Xbox 360 games on Xbox Series X going back at least a couple of months, with some replies to threads suggesting others have had problems going back as far as last November. The most commonly reported problem is an error message that reads, “Can’t connect to Xbox Live. Select Test Connection to troubleshoot your connection” that appears when players try to launch a game. These players report that their connections are fine, and all their non-Xbox-360 backward-compatible games are working. The issue doesn’t even seem to impact all Xbox 360 games, with a few folks saying saying they could get some games working, but not others. Several have stated that their Series console was brand new, suggesting it may be something impacting newer models particularly. While Xbox’s post focuses on Series X consoles, some Series S players are also reporting the same issue.
A Reddit thread from 11 days ago managed to rally a number of frustrated users around the issue, with those impacted documenting various responses from Xbox Support that confirmed Xbox was aware of the problem and that it was a service-side issue, not something that players could troubleshoot locally. One user shared what they claimed was a support message they received from Xbox after reporting the problem that may explain what’s going on:
What we can explain is that Xbox 360 backward‑compatible games rely on legacy Xbox 360 services for entitlement checks and content delivery, and newly purchased Series X consoles must freshly establish those connections during initial setup. That’s why this is primarily affecting newer consoles, while older or previously set‑up consoles, where these services were already validated may continue to work as expected.
We reached out to Xbox for comment last night after seeing the major Reddit thread above. Xbox Support posted its statement two hours later, and declined to comment further to Kotaku.
It isn’t entirely shocking that this issue seems to have been on some sort of troubleshooting backburner for months now. Not a ton of folks seem to be buying new Xbox consoles these days, and of those who are, an even smaller proportion are probably trying to load up their old Xbox 360 games. But that doesn’t make it any less frustrating for players who feel ignored and cheated by not being able to access a service they’ve paid for. Xbox has not provided a timeline for when this might be fixed, but hopefully the post last night means this is now a slightly higher priority. If you’re waiting desperately to play Crazy Taxi, GTA IV, the original Fable, or something else like that, hang in there just a little bit longer.
