Sea of Thieves is currently having login/authentication issues that look like “maintenance,” but the core game servers are not fully offline. Players are mainly seeing Kiwibeard-style errors when trying to sign in, while some people who were already online can keep playing.

What’s actually going on

  • A recent outage is affecting the login/auth/authentication side of Sea of Thieves rather than the game servers themselves.
  • This means you may get “down for maintenance” messages even though streamers or already-logged-in players are still sailing normally.
  • It appears to be an unscheduled issue, possibly tied to a third‑party service or platform services like Xbox Live rather than a planned patch window.

Is this related to an update?

  • Sea of Thieves has had scheduled maintenance around new seasonal or mid‑season updates, where servers really do go offline for a few hours.
  • Today’s problem is different: the forum discussion from January 25–26, 2026 calls out Kiwibeard errors and clarifies that “the servers are not actually down for maintenance.”

How long will Sea of Thieves be down?

  • For this specific Kiwibeard/authentication issue, there is no exact ETA, because it is not a planned maintenance with a fixed schedule.
  • Historically, when Sea of Thieves goes down for planned updates (for example, Season 18 content updates), downtime tends to run roughly 3–6 hours before servers are fully back online.
  • Unplanned outages can be shorter or longer depending on whether the root cause is on Rare’s side or on external services like cloud hosting or platform networks.

What you can do right now

  1. Try again later
    • If you are repeatedly seeing Kiwibeard or “down for maintenance” errors, give it 20–30 minutes before retrying, as authentication services are often restarted or throttled during an outage.
  1. Check official channels
    • Look at the official Sea of Thieves Support/X (Twitter) channels and the in‑game Support page for live status posts about sign‑in problems, beard errors, or scheduled maintenance windows.
  1. Verify platform status
    • If you are on Xbox or PC, check the platform’s network status page in case broader Xbox Live or related services are having issues that affect multiple games.
  1. Don’t constantly spam logins
    • In past incidents, the team has temporarily disabled sign‑in because “log in requests are taking too long due to overwhelming demand” and they needed to “unblock the pipe and trickle players back in.”
 * Rapidly retrying can add to the traffic spike and does not usually speed up your own login.

Why this is a trending topic

  • Sea of Thieves is still a very active live‑service game with regular seasonal content and big balance or economy changes, such as a recent controversial reset of Doubloons for Season 19 that upset long‑time players.
  • Because of that active community, any downtime—especially when it appears as a vague “maintenance” message or a beard error—quickly becomes a trending forum topic with players sharing error codes, memes, and frustration while they wait.

“Down for maintenance?” one forum user asked, and another clarified that it was likely an authentication outage and pointed to an official Kiwibeard errors post, noting that streamers were still online.

TL;DR

Sea of Thieves looks “down” right now mainly because of a Kiwibeard/authentication outage, not a full, planned maintenance shutdown, and there is no firm ETA yet, but similar disruptions are usually resolved within a few hours.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.