Solitaire won't let you sign in since Tuesday. One Windows service is probably the reason

"We couldn't sign you into Xbox Live", error 0x87DD0005, and your daily Solitaire streak is suddenly playing as Guest with level 1 progress. That has been the week for a lot of people since Tuesday's Windows updates. Neowin collected the reports on 15 October, and a Microsoft Q&A thread that started on the 14th has been growing since: Microsoft Solitaire & Casual Games, Microsoft Mahjong, Gears of War 4, Fishing Planet, Jigsaw. The odd part is that your Microsoft account is fine. The browser signs you in, the Xbox app signs you in, only the games refuse.

Two updates landed together on 13 October: the security update KB5127648 and the .NET Framework update KB5127694. People blame one or the other, and Microsoft has confirmed neither. Uninstalling them has been hit and miss, and Windows reinstalls them anyway. The Xbox status page has stayed green throughout, which makes "it's just an outage" an unsatisfying answer, though some users in New Zealand, the UK and Germany say it simply started working again on the 15th.

The fix that keeps being confirmed in that thread takes a minute and touches nothing you'd miss. Press the Windows key, type services.msc and open it. Find Microsoft Account Sign-in Assistant, double-click it, set Startup type to Automatic, click Apply, then right-click the service and choose Restart. Open the game again. If your progress shows as reset after you get back in, close the game and give the Xbox app an hour or two to sync your profile before you panic. Don't reinstall Windows over this, and don't pause security updates for weeks to dodge it; the October update also closes a flaw already being used in attacks.

That service is one of the dozens Tendvane's Repair wizards check and restart when something in Windows stops answering, which is less typing than services.msc.