Xbox explains outage preventing players from accessing games, CTO says it will “do better”

Xbox has provided an explanation for yesterday’s hours-long outage, which prevented players from signing in, accessing their libraries, and playing games.

In a statement on social media, CTO Scott Van Vliet noted that an “internal [licensing] service at Microsoft that is shared across multiple products” had failed.

“This caused some sign-in scenarios to fail, and it caused many scenarios that require an entitlement check to also fail, such as listing out your Full Library and launching games that you own,” wrote Van Vliet.

“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.”

He continued: “Once we isolated the failing infrastructure, we shifted traffic onto the healthy parts of the system while the team continued to work towards a root cause. Service came back unevenly across regions, which is why some of you recovered hours before others.”

Van Vliet said Xbox is now undertaking a “full-post incident review” to understand “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.”

“That means hardening the dependencies underneath sign-in and game launch, improving how we detect and contain this class of failure, and being faster and clearer with you when something breaks.

“Thank you for your patience and for the reports that genuinely helped us narrow this down. We’ll do better.”

Earlier last week, PlayStation also experienced an outage due to “connectivity issues” on Amazon Web Services servers.

As a result, players lost access to their digital game libraries. It occurred as the open beta of the platform-exclusive Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls was taking place.