Minecraft's servers are down, locking players out of the game for hours

There's nothing worse than booting up your favorite game, ready to spend hours grinding, only to find that server issues mean you can't get into it at all. For Minecraft fans, that's been the case on June 3, as Minecraft Bedrock is having issues with its authentication servers, while the Realms multiplayer system is down on both Bedrock and Java editions.

The sandbox game's issues first started around 12 am PDT / 3 am EDT / 8 am BST / 9am CEST, and continued to ramp up throughout the day. Authentication for Minecraft's Java edition is unaffected, so if you own it, you can still log in and jump into your single-player world, but online services for both versions have been interrupted.

On Bedrock, a large number of players are currently unable to open the game, as when they attempt to do so, they are met with one of two errors: "Oh no! Something went wrong, and we couldn't connect to the Minecraft services," or "We were unable to verify what products you own. Please check your internet connection." This is due to an issue with Microsoft's authentication servers, which are currently unable to tell who owns a copy of the game and who doesn't.

An issue that is affecting both Bedrock and Java, however, is linked to Realms. Realms are servers you can rent from Microsoft to play online saves with your friends. The entire system is currently down, and players are getting timed out when trying to join an existing Realm. All they're seeing is Error 502, which indicates a temporary error with your internet connection or with the server.

Fans of the sandbox game have been all over social media complaining about the issues, frustrated that they're unable to get on and enjoy everything that Minecraft has to offer. As mentioned above, at least Java players can still explore a single-player world, but for Bedrock users, it's simply a waiting game.

This has been a rough week for Minecraft's servers, as it suffered similar issues on Monday, June 1, when a Microsoft Azure outage took down the game's authentication servers. and had an impact on Xbox Live as well.

At the time of writing, Mojang has yet to respond to the server issues, so there's no timeline on when services will resume.