Xbox addresses recent outage hindering game access, with the CTO pledging improvements

Xbox has clarified the cause behind the prolonged disruption that recently left players unable to log in, access their libraries, or play games.

Scott Van Vliet, CTO of the company, shared on social media that the disruption was due to a failure in an "internal [licensing] service at Microsoft used by multiple products."

This service failure affected sign-in processes and other operations requiring an entitlement check, impacting access to users' Full Libraries and game launches. Van Vliet explained that the outage also had repercussions for several publishing and store partners reliant on these systems, resulting in varying issues across different games.

Steps were taken to reroute traffic through unaffected parts of the system once the unstable infrastructure was identified, but this led to an uneven recovery across different regions, causing some users to regain access sooner than others.

Xbox is now conducting a comprehensive review of the incident to determine why a single service failure had such extensive repercussions, why recovery was delayed, and how to prevent future vulnerabilities.

Van Vliet highlighted improvements needed in strengthening system dependencies, detecting and handling similar failures, and providing clearer communication during outages.

"Thank you for your patience and for assisting us with your reports. We aim to improve," he concluded.

In related news, last week, PlayStation faced an issue due to "connectivity problems" involving Amazon Web Services servers. This led to players being unable to access their digital games during the Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls beta, exclusive to the platform.