Update []:
Since our investigations on this yesterday, a member of the Playground Games team has confirmed that the Forza Horizon developer has "rebooted the servers", and is seeing "positive responses in terms of traffic on the servers" after this update.
Original Story: In recent days, we've seen reports from Xbox fans that 2016's Forza Horizon 3 is having server issues - with some folks even claiming that the game is completely unplayable online for them right now. As a result, we had a look at the game to see what's what, and our findings have been mixed when loading up FH3 at the beginning of 2025.
One thing's for sure at the time of writing - multiple Forza Horizon 3 features aren't working properly right now. On booting it up, 'Rivals', 'Clubs' and 'Auction House' features are all offline - they're simply greyed out and you can't access them at all on Xbox (the Marketplace tab has been inaccessible since the game was delisted on the Xbox Store).
However, when playing the game today, we've had no issues getting into standard online sessions here at the PX offices. For instance, Online Free Roam and Online Adventure worked just fine on the first try - and we found players straight away in both instances.
Here's us testing out FH3's online racing in January 2025:
This doesn't seem to be the case for everyone, though. On top of those greyed out features we're experiencing at Pure Xbox, some users just can't seem to play the game online at all right now. Again, we had no issues getting into races, but it seems that lots of players are having a completely difference experience with Forza Horizon 3 at the moment.
Does this mean that the game's online portion will be shut down soon? Well, possibly. We've had no confirmation on such an event from Xbox or developer Playground Games yet, but its predecessor Forza Horizon 2 went offline in summer 2023, and given that FH3 arrived two years later, we could easily see this one be retired online very soon.
Here's hoping it's just a blip and that Horizon 3 remains playable for a while yet!