Microsoft’s Chaotic Server Outage Was Down To A Single Service Failure

This week got off to a rocky start for Xbox, as a server outage saw players across the world unable to sign in, make purchases, or access their games for several hours. Those issues have since been fixed, and in a candid post online, Xbox Chief Technology Officer Scott Van Vliet spoke about what exactly happened to the Xbox network, how it was fixed, and what Microsoft will be doing to enhance its response times in the future. As Vliet explained, a licensing service that operates outside of Xbox began to fail, leading to the various problems that impacted not only the console's user base, but also publishing and store partners who rely on the same services. To fix this, Microsoft's engineers isolated the failing infrastructure, redirected traffic, and continued to work toward discovering the root cause behind the incident.