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

Xbox explains outage preventing players from accessing games, CTO says it will "do better" Platform holder undertaking "full-post incident review" to understand "why a failure in one service was able to take down this much" 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.