As someone who works in the cloud industry I understand why this is probably a perfect storm of issues that’s hard to fix, but if they’re working on it they’re doing a terrible job of showing it.
My speculation: They didn’t expect the DLC to take off. It’s one of the best graphics experiences on the Series X right now and the characters are so much better than the main campaign. Review sites / reddit are drooling over it. Thanks to Game Pass it’s easy for people to jump in, and then old players probably realize that OP5 makes PvE actually fun and try to stick around for Gearsmas.
TC probably has some scaling bug (software or under-provisioning) in their metadata service that’s causing it to brown out but not completely crash. That’s usually what would cause this kind of inconsistent behavior. Maybe they accidentally introduced it with the recent title update (these things happen).
Since the actual hosting servers are fine, people are getting just enough data to play games until it has to load something else and then boom you get kicked out. All the Xboxes and angry players are constantly trying to refresh to fix themselves, which ironically would just make everything even worse.
I’m pretty surprised that Microsoft doesn’t step in since at some point it looks pretty bad for Xbox. Maybe they’re trying to help but since they don’t actually own the code (they just provide the servers) they can’t do much?
At any rate, it’s disappointing since I actually got off work early for once and was looking forward to playing. Give them a break though - literally. Just turn off your Xbox or play something else. It’s the best thing you can do to help at this point.