We have an intriguing development in the world of Call of Duty today, folks. As part of what appears to be quite a hefty maintenance effort from the Activision team, a big batch of COD titles have gone offline for roughly four hours today - including some Xbox 360 classics like Modern Warfare 2 and the original Black Ops.
Xbox hasn't given us a reason behind this maintenance effort, but it's not a common thing by any stretch. In fact, we can't remember those older COD games ever going offline (at least not on purpose), with their player-hosted servers still being live and active on Xbox 360 to this day. These games are set to be playable again from 7am PT / 10am ET / 3pm BST on July 2nd.
Here's the full list of Call of Duty titles that have briefly been taken offline:
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (2023)
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2022)
Call of Duty: World War II
Call of Duty: Black Ops 3
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare
Call of Duty: Ghosts
Call of Duty: Black Ops 2
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2011)
Call of Duty: Black Ops
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009)
As we just mentioned, there's no more detail on this maintenance period just yet, but we can at least speculate a little bit on what this could entail. A selection of the above titles are rife with hacks and cheats, particularly those on Xbox 360, and there's every chance that Xbox & Activision have been working on a big anti-cheat effort for these games. If Microsoft wants to get them on Xbox Game Pass, it'd certainly make sense to clean the servers up beforehand.
As for the newer entries in this list, they're less blighted by these sorts of issues - but online games these days are rarely completely clean, so this could explain why a batch of more recent COD games could also be getting an anti-cheat sweep. Again, this is all speculation for now and we'll have to see if the team gives us an explanation on this soon - but we're certainly hoping that it leads to more of the classic Activision series on Xbox Game Pass.