Xbox Outage Blamed on Internal Service Failure, Microsoft Promises Resilience Fixes

Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet explained that a massive outage in July was caused by the failure of an internal service responsible for verifying licenses for purchased games and Game Pass content.

The same service is used by several Xbox features on PC, which exacerbated the problem when a bug in the Xbox client's software stack led to a cascading failure of related services.

Users were unable to launch their own games as a result, making the issue more serious than a simple disconnection of individual online functions.

After the incident, Microsoft transferred responsibility for the problematic licensing services to its internal team and is working to improve the system's resilience.

The company has already fixed the bug in the software stack, with an update rolling out yesterday, and promises to reveal additional details about its plans in the coming weeks and months.