Following up on the major Xbox outage from a couple of weeks ago, CTO Scott Van Vliet has now offered an update. In a lengthy social media post, Vliet once more confirmed that the outage was caused by an “underlying service” that is used by Xbox to validate purchased and Game Pass content, as well as some services on Xbox for PC.
Another bug was discovered in the Xbox client software stack that further compounded the issue, where unresponsive services also caused other license checks to fail. This, in turn, led to a cascading failure of services, affecting users’ ability to launch games that they already owned.
Since then, Vliet has noted that Xbox has transferred ownership of the licensing services that caused the issues to its in-house team, and engineers have been working to ensure the software stack is more resilient to similar failures. The bug discovered in the stack has also been fixed with an update that started rolling out yesterday.
As for the future, Vliet has explained that the engineering and operations teams are actively working to improve the stack’s reliability. More updates about how this will be achieved are slated to be revealed in the coming weeks and months. Updates for these issues will accompany new features and quality-of-life improvements.
The Xbox service failure was a major issue in July, with online services going down for around 15 hours. At the time, Vliet had called the outage “unacceptable”, and said that the team was committed to ensuring that it doesn’t happen again.
While Vliet acknowledged that the service outages on their own were bad, the fact that they caused a larger software stack collapse due to cascading failure made it worse. Along with this, he said that the company wants to be more transparent with issues like this going forward.
“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. 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.”
The outage happened right in the middle of a larger industry conversation about the pros and cons of digital versus physical games. With Sony announcing the end of the production of new PlayStation discs from January 2028 onwards, many have expressed concern about how this would affect game ownership, and whether services would be able to withstand system failures.
