If You’re an Alpha Insider, You May Not Want To Turn On Your Xbox Console for a Little While

Getting to test out new product features is pretty cool. Learning what companies are cooking behind the scenes and trying them out before the masses? It’s pretty stellar. At least when it works well, that is. It seems like Alpha Insiders are reporting that the latest mandatory update for Xbox Series consoles is completely resetting their systems to square one. All of their games, logins, everything — just gone. I know that Alpha stands for the beginning, but I don’t think this is what they signed up for.

Starting Fresh Has Its Benefits, but I Don’t Think Any Xbox Insider Would Willingly Do That

When signing up for the Xbox Insider program, inductees receive a warning that some features may not work as intended. It’s essentially Beta testing, so you expect some risks. But I don’t think there has ever been a bug this big, especially considering that these updates are considered mandatory updates. Even checking the Xbox Insiders Subreddit, there are plenty of posts about this new Alpha update. Full factory resets, issues logging in, the whole nine yards. It’s not a good look right now for Microsoft and the group.

Serious preview update bug!!!! Factory RESET!
byu/Xenokaiii inxboxinsiders

Some players have been trying to fix their software issues for upwards of 5 hours at this point, and Microsoft still has not pulled the update from the server. Seeing how some players lost their minds when PSN was down for roughly a day, I’m intrigued to see how the Xbox community is going to react to this type of news. So far, while people seem genuinely upset on the Subreddit, nobody is calling for reimbursements or compensation of any means. Yet, at least.

This is one of the unfortunate parts that comes with signing up for a testing project such as the Xbox Insider Program. Things like this can happen. But that doesn’t mean that they should. I feel like Microsoft is going to need to be a touch more careful with these updates in the future to avoid anyone finding themselves in the same situation. When everything else is an Xbox, it seems like they may have forgotten to take care of their actual console.