Xbox Live Custom Gamerpics Are Back As Moderation Strain Eases

In March this year, Xbox Support warned of "small adjustments" to its services in a notice on the Support website, in response to a huge increase of users on Xbox Game Pass, Xbox Live, and Mixer. Due to the overwhelming demand, the decision was made to temporarily turn off users' ability to submit their own photos for gamerpics, club pics, and club backgrounds.

With all user-submitted pics requiring approval by a moderator, the service has stayed offline to avoid overburdening Xbox's moderation team. Any attempt to upload a photo during this period was met with the error message: "Sorry, we can't upload your picture right now. Try again in a little while."

Other services were also impacted by the increase in demand, including outages to the Xbox Live service.

Now that countries around the world are starting to ease COVID-19 related restrictions, the burden on the system has eased, allowing users to once again submit their own photos as reported by Windows Central. There will still be a wait for submitted photos to be approved by moderators, however.

Xbox has seen a surge in users across all services as the pandemic has forced people to stay home. At its peak, Xbox Live reached almost 90 million users, while Xbox Game Pass surpassed 10 million paying subscribers.