Earlier, on Monday, Xbox faced a serious outage that affected players’ ability to sign in, access their games, and use the Xbox Store. As services have begun to go back online, Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet commented on the matter, stating that it “is an unacceptable situation.”
The Xbox Outage lasted about 16 hours before full services were restored. At around 8 PM ET/5 PM PT on Monday, Van Vliet posted a lengthy statement on X (formerly Twitter). According to the CTO, the cause of the outage was “a licensing service that sits outside of Xbox, but which Xbox depends upon”. When this service fell through, sign-ins failed. Xbox lost the ability to provide an entitlement check in many cases as well.
As the Xbox ecosystem largely deals with digital licenses for purchased games, failing to provide entitlement checks on games within a library, the entire system began to fail. Van Vliet states that this is in part why players were unable to access and play their games within their library. “It also affected several of our publishing and store partners who depend on those same systems which is why some of you saw issues in specific games and not others,” Van Vliet says.
It took hours for Xbox’s engineers to pinpoint the issue. However, once they identified it, traffic shifted to unaffected parts of the system, so engineers worked toward finding the root cause. Although it’s not stated whether the team was successful in finding the root cause, Xbox is “running a full post-incident review”.
“I care less about the one-line root cause and more about the real questions: why a failure in one service was able to take down this much, why recovery took as long as it did, and what we change so a single point of failure can’t ruin your night again,” Van Vliet states.
Van Vliet says that Xbox will be sharing more about what the company will be doing to make Xbox services better. There’s going to be more transparency so users can understand the lengths the company is going to take to avoid this type of outage in the future.
There’s been a lot of focus on digital ownership in the past few weeks. Xbox’s latest outage is a red flag, as players are bringing access to a digital library into question. Similarly, PlayStation suffered a similar outage days ago. That outage was compounded by the fact that the company recently announced its decision to end the production of physical discs in 2028.
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