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Xbox Gamers Discover 'Hack' for Better Performance, But it's Really Weird
Home>News>Platform>Xbox
Published 17:00 1 Jan 2026 GMT

Xbox Gamers Discover 'Hack' for Better Performance, But it's Really Weird

Say bye to your friends

Angharad Redden

Angharad Redden

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Featured Image Credit: Microsoft

Topics: Xbox, Xbox One, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X, Microsoft, PC

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We all want our consoles and hardware to run at peak performance, especially if we are unable to justify splashing the cash on any major upgrades.

Luckily, if you are an Xbox user, players have discovered a way to boost your hardware’s performance, even if that means saying goodbye to your friends.

According to an investigation by Halo pro streamer Brett Leonard, his Xbox account has been the victim of severe issues for over seven years and he may have just discovered why.

Put simply, Leonard has too many friends.

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Whilst I can’t relate, it would seem as though “the amount of friends/data on the account caused inputs to not register properly while also not being synced to the servers as fast as possible”.

According to a recent post shared to Leonard’s Twitter account, the issue first arose after the launch of Halo 5 when the “NXOE update” launched for the Xbox One in 2015.

“If I remember correctly, that's when a more major heavy aim was introduced in Halo 5 and it started to weigh your account down if you had a lot of friends/data,” they explained.

“Which may explain why during the beta and the first couple weeks of Halo 5, the aiming was not nearly as bad.

However, Leonard also goes on to explain that this is not just an Xbox issue but can also be relevant for PC users.

“It's also 100% official that this happens on PC as well.

Xbox Series X/
Microsoft

“This is NOT an Xbox console exclusive issue.

“This has to do with how inputs/data are stored in packets that are sent to the servers.

The hardware is not relevant in this situation.”

How To Improve Your Xbox's Performance

Put simply, it would seem as though deleting all of your saved messages and removing friends from your Xbox account could in fact boost the console’s performance, especially multiplayer network performance across Xbox One, Series X/S, and PC.

However, as you can imagine, some users did not take this seriously.

“Being a loner finally saving my frames, nice,” one user shared.

“So, you're telling me my Xbox has been lagging because I refuse to delete old messages?” Another asked. “Ok, that's actually personal.”

Microsoft is yet to release a statement on this particular issue but it would be a shame for users to delete old messages, especially if this report proves to be untrue.

However, if your Xbox console is dealing with excessive lag and performance issues, maybe it will be worth seeing if clearing out your storage helps.



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